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The first posthumous retrospective of designer Virgil Abloh's work will take over the Brooklyn Museum this summer. "Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech," will showcase two decades of work by the American fashion designer, who passed at the age of 41 in November of last year.
The new show will open on July 1 and be on view through January 29, 2023 inside the cultural center's Great Hall. "This is the first museum survey exhibition devoted to the late artist and designer Virgil Abloh, whose work reshaped notions of contemporary fashion, art, commerce, design and youth culture," reads an official press release announcing the news. "The exhibition showcases a mix of fashion, large-scale sculpture, immersive spaces, videos and sketches spanning nearly two decades of Abloh's career."
The show will actually build upon an eponymous earlier version that was set up in Chicago in 2019 and then traveled to Boston, Atlanta and Qatar.
Abloh was a defining figure of the art and fashion world, also a trained architect, and his untimely death following a private battle with cancer shook devotees around the world. Known for being the very first Black creative director at Louis Vuitton, Abloh also made a mark in creative circles by founding Milan-based fashion house Off-White in 2013, still an incredibly popular brand.
In addition to the Abloh retrospective, Brooklyn Museum's 2022 exhibition slate includes a new installation focusing on European artists, a show that takes a critical look at the environmental impact of whaling and plastics ("DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash") and the very first survey of the work of Jimmy DeSana, a key figure in the city's countercultural arts and music scene during the 1970s and 1980s ("Jimmy DeSana: Submission").
It's gearing up to be a pretty busy year in Brooklyn.