Meet UNNO, the New Online Gallery Championing Latin American Design

UNNO, a new online-only gallery from architect Laura Abe Vettoretti and interior designer Maria Dolores, is making the most of the situation after plans to open a physical gallery in Milan last year were put on hold. Their mission, they tell us, is to introduce the richly varied landscape of Latin American design to collectors across the globe, spurred on by the region’s fertile mix of craft tradition and yet-to-be-discovered crop of contemporary designers.
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These Garance Vallée Paintings and Totems Are Familiar But Surreal

For her inaugural American exhibition this month at Carvalho Park in Brooklyn, Garance Vallée was meant to create a holistic environment, working with fabricators in the neighborhood to create a kind of set design that would encompass her new paintings, which are on view for the first time. That plan, of course, was scrapped when COVID hit, and Vallée scaled down her ambitions to that which could be fabricated in her own live/work space in Paris, then shipped in a crate to New York. In some ways, however, being forced to reckon with her own surroundings is part of the point of the exhibition.
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These Ceramic Lamps, Paired With Delicate Paper and Bamboo Shades, Are About to Be Everywhere

We first stumbled across Bennet Schlesinger's lamps on the Instagram of a friend. Perched atop two handmade ceramic bases were shades made from translucent paper sheets, stretched across a cambered latticework of bamboo strips. They were glowing and fresh and new, and we immediately fell in love. Now, the Southern California–based Schlesinger, who designs under the name Lightsong Exchange, is co-headlining an exhibition of his work at the new Los Angeles gallery Stanley’s.
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If You’re Tired of the Brass Trend, This is the Exhibition For You

As design editors, it is our duty to report on design trends or at least acknowledge the ones that take over a certain year. But that does not mean we necessarily like all of those trends, nor do we always agree with the pace at which they bloom, wither, and die. Studio Vedèt founder Valentina Ciuffi must have had some bone to pick with the utter ubiquity of brass over the past few years for she recently curated an exhibition for FAR at Nilufar Gallery in Milan, featuring 13 designers and studios experimenting with metals and materials other than brass.
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A Group Exhibition in Detroit Celebrates the Design Scene of a City That Was ‘Never Normal’

Never Normal — a timely group exhibition by the Detroit gallery Wasserman Projects, in collaboration with the local collective Form&Seek — examines how, post-pandemic, our relationships with our domestic spaces are transforming in ways we might not even be able to fully understand yet. But it also celebrates a city that in many ways has long considered itself an outlier.
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With Degree Shows Cancelled, A Stockholm Museum Offers Students the Chance to Show Their Work

With the pandemic in mind, the Stockholm-based Möbeldesignmuseum — which was founded in February 2018 by collectors and design world insiders Kersti Sandin and Lars Bülow — decided to create a platform for final year students from Beckmans, HDK-Valand, Konstfack and Malmstens. Called Ex-Works, the exhibition features work by 23 designers from the four schools, and the curated works are uniformly strong.
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In This Banner Year for Outdoor Art, Anders Ruhwald’s IMA Garden Installation is a Standout Favorite

At Newfields, the gardens that surround the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Detroit-based ceramicist Anders Herwald Ruhwald installed an exhibition of 10 large-scale ceramic works. Titled Century Garden, the sculptures — many of which are meant to hold plants — were tucked into the wilder, more overgrown parts of the garden; though the ceramic surfaces appeared almost tie-dyed, mottled as they were with yellows and blues, tangerine oranges and greens, they were camouflaged amongst the flowers and native plants, creating an uncanny effect.
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Duro Olowu’s Mind-Expanding Chicago Exhibition Crosses Time, Place, Gender, and Race

Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, the highly anticipated exhibition curated by the Nigerian-born British designer, was up for only two weeks at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago before the pandemic shutdown of last March. But when the MCA re-opened, it thankfully extended the show's run into early fall. Walking through the rooms — teeming with over 300 works Olowu selected from the city’s public and private art collections — was a bit like scrolling through a really engaging, unpredictable Instagram account, but without the glazed exhaustion and listlessness that comes from being so online. Or the frustration of being on the outside looking in. This was a show that welcomed you.
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With Design Parade Postponed Until 2021, the Cities of Hyères and Toulon Took Their Exhibitions (Mostly) Outside

Like most international art and design festivals this year, the annual Design Parade — which typically takes place across two cities in the south of France and is on record as one of our favorites — was forced to postpone its summer edition until 2021. Somehow, though, these restrictions don't seem to have reduced the activity in Hyères and Toulon by much.
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Do You Love Your Toilet Paper Holder? Probably Not, But At a New Show, There Are 50+ Reasons to Change Your Mind

Toilet paper holders are, as a general rule, kind of the worst — which is why it's so heartening to see a whole exhibition devoted to them at Marta Los Angeles, on view from September 10 through November 1. Like so many everyday object shows before it, Under/Over — which features contributions from 53 studios — is both a cross-section of contemporary design, and a reflection of each designer's practice.
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