Brooklyn Museum dedicates first museum survey exhibition to Virgil Abloh

The Brooklyn Museum has devoted a first museum survey exhibition to late artist and designer Virgil Abloh. Titled “Figures of Speech”, the exhibition will start on 1st July 2022 and end on 29th January 2023. It will showcase a mix of fashion, large-scale sculpture, immersive spaces, videos and sketches spanning nearly two decades of Abloh’s career.

“This is the first museum survey exhibition devoted to late artist and designer Virgil Abloh, whose work reshaped notions of contemporary fashion, art, commerce, design, and youth culture,” said The Brooklyn Museum in its announcement of the 2022 exhibition schedule.

"Virgil Abloh: 'Figures of Speech'” is organised by Michael Darling, former James W. Alsdorf chief curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The Brooklyn Museum presentation is organized by Antwaun Sargent, independent curator and writer, and supported by Northern Trust.

Among other highlights of the 2022 exhibition are the museum's artist presentations featuring Brooklyn-based Salvadoran artist Guadalupe Maravilla’s exploration of intergenerational healing through art and ritual in his solo exhibition; the first museum survey of the work of Jimmy DeSana, a pioneering figure in post-Conceptual photography; boundary-breaking art by Nellie Mae Rowe, an important but overlooked figure of 20th-century American folk art and Brooklyn artist Duke Riley’s examination of the plastic industry’s environmental impact on global and local ecosystems.

The latter, titled “Death to the Living, Long Live Trash” will start on 17th June 2022 and end on 23rd April 2023. In it, Riley takes a critical look at the environmental impact of two major industries that have had a significant effect on global and local ecosystems: whaling and plastics.

“The exhibition displays Riley’s recent works, which transform everyday plastic waste into scrimshaw, fishing lures and sailor’s valentines (a type of souvenir made from seashells) in a commentary of he role that major corporations and individuals have had in the destruction of the Earth's waterways, past and present,” explains the museum.