With a demanding finance career and a parallel practice as a visual artist, San Francisco-based Grace Zhang moves between two seemingly different worlds. But both involve looking for patterns and making sense of complexity. A graduate of Columbia University’s international affairs program, Zhang sees painting as a counterpoint to her work in finance, a “way to decompress from the intensity of the markets.” She also designs original jewelry and fine watches, drawing inspiration from Paul Cézanne’s structural approach to color and form.

Zhang’s paintings reflect a wide range of influences, from her world travels and love of haute couture to Buddhist philosophy and Cézanne. Saturated, contrasting colors, geometric forms, and dot-and-wave motifs appear throughout her work, while her self-portraits nod to Chanel and Dior. Yet the singular creative work that has left the deepest impression on her is Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Fugue No. 24 in B minor.”

“What I love about [that piece] is the balance between structure and emotion,” she explains. “…weaving together into something extraordinarily intricate yet harmonious. I’m fascinated by how something so carefully constructed can also express such profound feelings.”

Photography by Brendan Mainini; courtesy of Grace Zhang and GCS Agency

Zhang also seeks that balance between order and emotion in her paintings, bringing “complexity and order, but also tenderness, passion, and a quiet sense of transcendence” to her work. She explores questions of life and death, the earth and the universe through the lens of Buddhist teachings. Her newest series, Aurora Undae Country Club, brings together her fascination with the cosmos and her love of golf, imagining the sport as “a portal between earthly experience and cosmic space.”

For today’s Friday Five, we spent five minutes with Grace Zhang discussing her current exhibition, Spacetime Monologue, on view at the GCS Agency gallery in San Francisco through Oct. 25.

Photography by Brendan Mainini; courtesy of Grace Zhang and GCS Agency

‘Spacetime Monologue’

Zhang’s first public exhibition of paintings includes 32 works spanning several bodies of work: haute couture-inspired self-portraits, paintings interpreting science and financial markets, and the golf series.

“At the heart of my painting is a search for the underlying structures and principles of the universe, a sense that beneath everything around us lies a deeper truth,” Zhang says. “I embrace the complexity of lived experience: the constant flow of impressions, stories, and encounters, alongside my interests in travel, fashion, financial markets, and much more.”

She describes her work as “Buddhist philosophy meets the structural logic I find in Cézanne.” Her Bloomberg Terminal and canvas sit side by side, “so I’m constantly moving between the two worlds,” she says. “They may seem completely different, but both are about looking for patterns, understanding cycles, and making sense of what can initially feel like chaos.”

Installation view of ‘Spacetime Monologue.’ Photography by Brendan Mainini; courtesy of Grace Zhang and GCS Agency.

What Inspired ‘Spacetime Monologue’

“My paintings seek underlying structures across different disciplines and experiences,” Zhang says. “Some begin with science, others with travel or financial markets, but dots and waves recur throughout the work, connecting these different starting points.”

‘Quantum Whisper’ by Grace Zhang. Photography courtesy of the artist.

The Duality of Light

In the famous double-slit experiment, light passing through two narrow slits produces an interference pattern characteristic of waves. When measured to determine which slit each photon passes through, that interference pattern disappears, revealing light’s particle-like behavior. This sparked Zhang’s curiosity.

“I was drawn to the idea that something as fundamental as light can be both at once, and that the act of looking changes what we see,” she explains. “In Quantum Whisper, dots and waves become a visual language for this duality, shaping both the composition and the painting’s quiet, mysterious atmosphere.”

A view of the Lijiiang village. Photography by Grace Zhang.

The Mountain Sky

While traveling in Lijiang, Zhang was intrigued by Jade Dragon Mountain’s jagged outline against the sky, which led to her painting Jade Hash.

“Its ridgeline reminded me of the market charts I watch every day, from cryptocurrency to U.S. debt,” she says. “In Jade Hash, the mountain’s silhouette becomes a simplified outline of the market’s peaks and troughs, a wave-like form connecting the landscape with the rhythms of finance.”

‘Jade Hash’ by Grace Zhang. Photography courtesy of the artist.

Elliott Wave Theory

Working in finance, Zhang became interested in Elliott wave theory, a form of technical analysis that proposes markets move in recurring wave patterns influenced by collective investor psychology, including fear and greed, despair and euphoria. She says that “the idea that something as chaotic as a market might have an underlying rhythm” sparked her creativity.

“In my paintings, those cycles become waves, rising and falling across the canvas, and they carry the same emotional swings,” she explains. “It shapes both the form of works like Jade Hash and their atmosphere.”

‘Self Portrait I’ by Grace Zhang. Photography courtesy of the artist.

Chanel Haute Couture Spring-Summer 2021, Look 5

“My first Chanel haute couture jacket became the starting point for my first self-portrait, Self Portrait I. I appreciate its wave-like pattern, which I interpreted through the wave nature of light,” Zhang explains. “In the painting, its blue and yellow tones sit against a red, universe-like background, while the jacket’s reflective details are transformed into stars.”

‘Self-Portrait—One Night at Dar El Bacha’ by Grace Zhang. Photography courtesy of the artist.

Chanel Haute Couture Spring-Summer 2024, Look 45

Self-Portrait—One Night at Dar El Bacha features a Chanel look from the SS24 haute couture collection. “I connect it to my travels in Morocco and to the geometric traditions of Islamic art,” Zhang says. “In the painting, the dark ensemble and its colorful embellishments evoke the night sky and humanity’s fascination with the cosmos.”

A compelling new body of work from Hungarian artist Boldizar Senteski has arrived at StudioTwentySeven in New York City. The Erosion Collection, a triptych of handmade mirrors shaped by oxidation, corrosion, and the passage of time, is designed not only as a reflective surface but also as a means of revealing the intricacies of transformation.

Photography by Panna Donka

“I’ve always been drawn to the urban environment; the way it carries the marks of time and holds a record of its own transformation,” Senteski says. “I wanted to capture the beauty of change with this new collection, using oxidation and corrosion as a way of allowing time to become part of the work itself.”

Photography by Panna Donka

The mirrors reflect Senteski’s enduring interest in the ambiguous space between art and design, where functional objects transcend utility to become sculptural, expressive forms. Framed in highly polished stainless steel, the collection draws inspiration from fragments of the urban environment, including Brutalist forms, architecture, raw concrete, and weathered materials. Through oxidation, silvering, and repeated layering, the surfaces gradually transform. Senteski establishes the conditions for this process, then allows the materials to play an active role in shaping the final work.

Photography courtesy of Boldizar Senteski

Handcrafted in Hungary, each of the three mirrors is a unique, signed work accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. The collection is available exclusively through StudioTwentySeven; pricing is available upon request.

Photography by Panna Donka

At StudioTwentySeven, Senteski’s work explores the shifting boundary between object and reflection, inviting viewers to encounter each mirror as an artifact shaped by time, process, and chance.

Photography by Panna Donka

For Senteski, creating the mirrors requires a delicate balance between intention and unpredictability. “I establish the conditions for the process to unfold but ultimately allow the material to shape itself. There’s something special about the way each piece finds its own form,” Senteski says. “Every mirror in the collection is unique, carrying traces that can never be replicated.”

For decades, Ebony and Jet were among the most important publications documenting Black American life and culture, making Johnson Publishing Company the era’s most influential Black-owned media corporation. Completed in 1972, its headquarters at 820 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago gave that cultural presence a physical form. More than 40 years later, photographer Barbara Karant began documenting the now-abandoned building, capturing its kaleidoscopic patterns, mirrored surfaces, and remarkably intact 1970s interiors. Her photographs are now collected in 820 Ebony/Jet: Visions of the Johnson Publishing Company, an American Icon, a new monograph from MW Editions that preserves the building and its design legacy.

Photography courtesy of courtesy MW Editions

The headquarters was significant before anyone stepped inside. Publisher John H. Johnson had faced resistance from real estate agents and bankers wary of financing a Black-owned company, and ultimately commissioned John Moutoussamy, the first Black architect to design a downtown Chicago high-rise. Rather than the glass-and-steel towers common to the era, Johnson wanted a building with permanence and character. Moutoussamy delivered a restrained exterior clad in travertine marble.

Photography courtesy MW Editions

Inside, restraint gave way to something far more expressive. Palm Springs designers Arthur Elrod and William Raiser gave each of the building’s 11 floors its own combination of color and pattern, creating interiors that reflected Johnson Publishing Company’s cultural ambitions as much as its corporate identity. The cafeteria paired orange, purple, and gold chevrons, while co-founder Eunice Johnson’s cream-and-honey office incorporated pieces from the couple’s art collection. Geometric wallpapers, mirrored surfaces, bold carpets, and richly patterned finishes appeared throughout.

Photography courtesy MW Editions

Remarkably, much of that design remained unchanged until Johnson Publishing Company left the building in 2012. Karant began photographing the empty headquarters the following year and continued through 2018. With the furnishings gone, she focused her lens on the surfaces and details that defined the interiors: geometric wallpapers, mirrored dressing rooms, and the Test Kitchen’s swirling laminate cabinetry, whose psychedelic patterning recalls Italian marbled paper. Mirrors double and multiply motifs within her compositions, while the executive floor’s picture windows bring Lake Michigan and Grant Park into view.

Photography courtesy MW Editions

The building’s emptiness is part of what gives the photographs their power. Stripped of the people, magazines, and day-to-day activity that once animated the headquarters, the rooms become studies in color, pattern, and material—but also records of a workplace and cultural institution that no longer exists in this form.

The book broadens that record with documentary images of the original interiors and Ebony’s in-house photo studio, as well as Richard Hunt’s site-specific lobby sculpture, Expansive Construction (1972). Recollections from former employees add firsthand accounts of life inside the building, while the book also traces its influence on artists including Theaster Gates, Hank Willis Thomas, Kwame Brathwaite, Lorna Simpson, Martine Syms, and David Hartt.

Photography courtesy MW Editions

At 240 pages, 820 Ebony/Jet brings together 142 color and eight black-and-white images, with a foreword by artist Deborah Willis and essays by Aaron Bryant, Cheryl Finley, Carla Williams, Jon Ott, Brenna Wynn Greer, and E. James West. The book preserves a remarkable chapter of American design history—and the physical environment created for two publications that helped shape how Black American life was seen, documented, and celebrated.

Published by MW Editions, 820 Ebony/Jet: Visions of the Johnson Publishing Company, an American Icon, is available Oct. 13 for $65.

The streets of London are currently home to art on the move—literally. In collaboration with Brooklyn-based artist Kozo and Cart Department, The Peninsula London has transformed six of its signature green vehicles into A World Within, a traveling exhibition that intertwines mythology, history, and contemporary art.

Photography courtesy of The Peninsula London

Timed to coincide with Frieze London, the exhibition brings Kozo’s artwork onto the streets of the city. The cars retain their signature Peninsula Green, which serves as the backdrop for Kozo’s graphic illustrations. Conceived as one continuous story, the designs draw on the hotel’s history, the wider Peninsula brand, and its British surroundings.

The Peninsula Pages, white-uniformed attendants, appear to peel back the exterior of each vehicle, revealing historical scenes underneath. Grazing animals, stately homes, and winding rivers appear in subtle greens and grays that complement the fleet’s existing color, while classical motifs such as the Guardian Lions and British landmarks like Wellington Arch connect the hotel to its surroundings.

Photography courtesy of The Peninsula London

The contrast between the three-dimensional landscapes and the flatter, monochromatic figures creates a distinction between past and present. The result reflects Kozo’s intention to bring history and myth back to life, inviting viewers to become part of the story as they travel in the Art Fleet.

Creating A World Within required Kozo to adapt his experience in painting and tattoo art to an atypical surface. Starting by digitally sketching over photographs of each vehicle, he developed illustrations guided by each car’s curves and angles. The shape and size of each hood, door, and trunk determined how the imagery unfolded across the body. Rather than fighting the existing elements, Kozo worked them into the graphics, using each car’s contours to guide his design choices. The finished artwork was translated into bespoke vinyl wraps, which were applied by detailing experts at Topaz.

Photography courtesy of The Peninsula London

“A car is not a blank white canvas,” Kozo explains. “This project forced me to translate my language as a painter and tattoo artist onto a moving vessel.”

The collection includes two Rolls-Royce Phantoms, a Bentley Bentayga, an electrified Austin Taxi, a BMW i7, and a LEVC, all bookable for guest transportation throughout October. Together, the six vehicles connect The Peninsula’s longstanding automotive tradition with contemporary art, turning an everyday journey through London into an encounter with the hotel’s history.

Photography courtesy of The Peninsula London

A World Within is on view through Oct. 31, with all six vehicles available for booking by guests of The Peninsula London.

Fragments of mirrored glass split, gather light, then come together as a new whole. In the storied rooms of Toronto’s Spadina Museum, an 1866 mansion, interdisciplinary artist Ry Van Der Hout’s sculptures catch light and open fresh ways of seeing and hearing family lore. In Broken Light, a deeply site-specific exhibition of Van Der Hout’s new work, opened at the museum on Aug. 26 and runs through Oct. 18.

Spadina Museum. Photography by Ry Van Der Hout.

“At the heart of In Broken Light is the understanding that shattering isn’t the end of a story—it’s the beginning of a new narrative,” curator Adrien Sun Hall says. “Ry Van Der Hout begins their sculptural practice with acts of intentional breaking, shattering glass and mirrors only to painstakingly solder them back together using traditional Tiffany stained-glass techniques. These intricately mended surfaces become metaphors for queer becoming and personal transformation. The fractures become apertures through which overlooked histories emerge, transforming the sculptures into contemporary reliquaries for lives remembered and forgotten.”

‘Open Wing Death’ by Ry Van der Hout. Photography by Van Der Hout.

Five sculptural interventions are staged across the mansion’s four stories, incorporating photography, stained glass, and mirrors. Responding to the house’s various rooms, the sculptures draw on research and conversations with spiritual leaders, family descendants, historians, guides, and conservators. The former resident families supply ample inspiration; their stories, ranging from forbidden love to fatal illness, are often stranger than fiction.

‘Tiber’ by Ry Van Der Hout at Spadina Museum. Photography courtesy of the artist and United Contemporary.

In the basement’s preserved archaeological dig site, a fractured disco ball spins to a NASA-produced audio track, casting a mosaic of light onto stone walls and infilled windows. Upstairs, a stained-glass sculpture printed with photographs of Tiber, a historical interpreter at the museum, has been shattered and reassembled. Van Der Hout made it from a reclaimed antique dressing-table mirror holder, found serendipitously in a dumpster at their studio.

“It felt like I got pulled into this story of an object guiding you to tell you that you are in the right place,” Van Der Hout says.

‘Orpheus Twice’ by Ry Van Der Hout at Spadina Museum. Photography courtesy of the artist and United Contemporary.

The largest work in the exhibition, Open Wing Death, is a 12-foot-high ovoid geodesic dome installed on the unrestored third floor of Spadina Museum. Added in 1913 as a sunlit sanctuary for a resident with tuberculosis, the room later housed the household’s domestic staff, to whom the sculpture is dedicated. Before peering inside, I catch stray glimpses of myself in the mirrored facets at various angles. For a split second, I appear to myself as a stranger, seen as if through someone else’s eyes, before recognition sets in.

‘The Shattering’ by Ry Van Der Hout at Spadina Museum. Photography courtesy of the artist and United Contemporary.

In Broken Light is on view at Spadina Museum in Toronto until Oct. 18.

Is there any logo more iconic than the Nike swoosh? Unlikely. In fact, it’s arguably the most recognizable symbol in sports. But how did a small running company become a global powerhouse? Vitra Design Museum set out to find out, gaining unprecedented access to the Department of Nike Archives (DNA) to curate Nike: Form Follows Motion. First presented in Germany in 2024, the exhibition is now on view at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York through March 2027.

Installation view of Nike: Form Follows Motion at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY. Photo: Jenna Bascom. Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design

Vitra Design Museum had been considering an exhibition about sports and design for years. When it approached Nike, the museum learned the extent of the company’s private archive, opening the door to a collaboration.

Installation view of Nike: Form Follows Motion at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY. Photo: Jenna Bascom. Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design

“I was able to draw on the extraordinary depth and breadth of DNA’s holdings, including objects, documents, prototypes, study models, and material research, as well as some current designs from the company,” exhibition curator Glenn Adamson says.

Installation view of Nike: Form Follows Motion at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY. Photo: Jenna Bascom. Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design

And what a time to bring Nike: Form Follows Motion to New York City, in a year when the Knicks won their first NBA championship in 53 years and the 2026 World Cup final was played just across the river.

Objects from Frank Rudy, who invented the Air Technology, from the Department of Nike Archives (DNA). Photography by Alastair Philip Wiper; courtesy of Nike.

“Having the exhibition travel right to the heart of New York couldn’t feel more appropriate,” Adamson says. “Nike has a very special relationship to New York City, going back at least to the early 1980s … when hip hop broke, coming out of Queens and Harlem. And the hip-hop community was very interested in streetwear generally, brands like Nike especially.”

A graffiti installation by Faust on the MAD Store doors. Photography courtesy of the artist.

Further connecting the exhibition to New York’s counterculture, renowned graffiti artist Faust, whose work is quintessentially NYC, created the cover of the book accompanying the installation and added his signature graffiti to the museum store door.

An early mechanical Shox prototype, c.1981. Photography from the Department of Nike Archives; courtesy of the Museum of Art and Design.

So what exactly is being exhibited at Nike: Form Follows Motion? Beyond the finished products most visitors will recognize, the exhibition focuses heavily on what usually remains unseen: prototypes, experiments, sketches, and design studies.

Familiar products like the Waffle Trainer, Air Force 1, Air Jordan, Air Max, Flyknit, and Vaporfly are displayed next to rare one-offs.

Various lasts, jigs, silicone pads, and fixtures from Nike’s Advanced Product Creation Center. Photography by Alastair Philip Wiper; courtesy of Nike.

The exhibition is presented in four sections across two floors of MAD. “Track” explains Nike’s origins, founded in the ’60s by Phil Knight and his former track coach Bill Bowerman.

“Air” transitions to the ’80s, when Nike’s pressurized Air cushioning became a major focus of the company’s design development. The technology was made visible for the first time in the 1987 Air Max, and sketches, notes, and prototypes reveal how it evolved.

Photography by Bernhard Strauss; courtesy of Vitra Design Museum

“Sensation” explores the Nike Sport Research Lab, which studies the body in motion, evaluates the science behind the shoe, and examines Nike’s research into circular manufacturing, material sourcing, and recycling.

Finally, “Relation” is the exhibition’s grand finale, showcasing 50 transformative and often avant-garde footwear styles alongside hip-hop music videos, explicitly illustrating the correlation between Nike and streetwear culture.

A sketch of Air Max by Tinker Hatfield, 1986. Image courtesy of Nike.

“What’s really special … is that we have so many rarities from the archives,” Adamson explains. “That would include very early relics that are now unique objects [and] a lot of prototypes that show how these designs—which are very technically involved—were actually invented and developed.”

Thanks to the wealth of material from the DNA, including more than 200,000 objects that had never before been presented to the public as a curated collection, Adamson says the exhibition offers a glimpse of Nike’s “design process on the fly.”

Installation view of Nike: Form Follows Motion at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY. Photo: Jenna Bascom. Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design

Nike: Form Follows Motion is on view at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York until Mar. 7, 2027.

Berlin-based Georgian artist Thea Djordjadze returns to New York for the first time in a decade to exhibit A well of night, on view at Sprüth Magers. In her first solo exhibition at the gallery’s New York location, Djordjadze creates the installation in dialogue with the building’s neo-Renaissance architecture. And that’s typical of her work. Djordjadze is known to integrate her installations into the surrounding architecture to create site-specific sculptural environments.

Thea Djordjadze. Photography by Maka Kukulava, at.ge; courtesy of Sprüth Magers.

“For me, the building and the design and the architecture are very important,” Djordjadze told Elephant in 2024. “The sculpture is making decisions; it’s telling me where to go, how to be positioned. It’s not only me. It’s the interaction between me and the sculpture and the building.”

Photography by Genevieve Hanson; courtesy of Sprüth Magers.

A well of night combines new and old, featuring some existing pieces alongside new art, including new plaster relief paintings and reconfigured sculptures. Curious about how context informs the perception of art, Djordjadze says that when configuring an exhibition, she starts to “listen to the void, listen to the building, to the pieces.”

Photography by Genevieve Hanson; courtesy of Sprüth Magers

In A well of night, Djordjadze juxtaposes steel and aluminum with new sculptural paintings, rich with pigment worked into the porous surface and built up in layers across a creamy plaster ground. The resulting 3D abstraction, known as a painterly relief, unites painting and sculpture in a single piece.

Photography by Genevieve Hanson; courtesy of Sprüth Magers

In another play on contrast, the exhibition’s name, A well of night, suggests darkness that the artist counters by cladding the gallery’s dark hardwood floors with light-colored vinyl, blurring spatial boundaries and altering the experience of the room. Within this carefully curated setting, Djordjadze displays a steel vitrine with a print sealed behind plexiglass that reflects the surrounding space, making the setting part of the artwork. This form, which she first introduced in 2017, references her Georgian roots through mid-century display cases designed by Georgian anthropologist Alexander Javakhishvili and painter Avtandil Varazi for Tbilisi’s archaeological museum.

Photography by Genevieve Hanson; courtesy of Sprüth Magers

To Djordjadze, her work is never quite “finished.” She sees her pieces as works in progress, continually reevaluating them in relation to one another and to each new exhibition space.

Photography by Genevieve Hanson; courtesy of Sprüth Magers

Thea Djordjadze’s exhibition A well of night is on view at Sprüth Magers, New York, through December 2026.

When Hannah Buechler was 13 years old, she spent hours in her mother’s garage, happily painting with her hands and making a mess. Even at this young age, she had already discovered her calling. “I realized then—and I still believe this to be true now—that making art was what I enjoyed most,” she says.

A multidisciplinary artist, Buechler received her bachelor’s degree in fibers from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Now based in Los Angeles, she launched her eponymous studio to produce her signature tactile collages. She also explores how simplicity can blossom into complex layers as she makes rich textures from small, repetitive gestures.

As the daughter of a scientist, Buechler gives thoughtful consideration to the origins, properties, and possibilities of her materials. She has experimented with everything from resin to embroidery, and even makes her own textiles.

Buechler has loved fashion for as long as she can remember, and in 2021, she accepted a role at apparel company Libertine. As the brand’s senior designer, she specializes in patterns, screenprinting, and digital graphics.

Buechler is content to balance her 9-to-5 duties with her craft for now, but she envisions a future pivot. “I have always had a creative corporate job while continuing my studio practice,” she notes. “I have done my best to sell my work on my own, but I am hopeful I can make this my sole career.”

Today, Hannah Buechler joins us for Friday Five! Below, she shares five inspirations and five of her favorite projects.

Hannah Buechler’s 5 Inspirations

Ozzy Osbourne from the cover of ‘The Ultimate Sin’ painted on ‘Flight DL 7710: Embrace The Crash’ by Hannah Buechler. Photography by Julia Deptula.

1. Music

Music has always been a driving force and inspiration for my work. Often I create a piece and feel a song, where it may be the colors or patterns, and many times I name my pieces after song titles. I don’t shuffle my music, so when I listen to albums, I can hear the song transitions and understand the style behind each artist’s album. My taste is all over the place: I love heavy metal, rap, pop, rock, and indie. Today, I started my day listening to Electric Light Orchestra, then switched to Candlemass and Ariana Grande.

Photography courtesy of Hannah Buechler

2. Experimenting

Being an experimental artist has opened the door to continuous learning. I love blending processes with materials so much that I create my own textiles, including what I call my loom bands. Over the years, I have loved to experiment with resin, embroidery, and painting techniques. One of my favorite experimental projects—which I have yet to release—is called Freshman 25. As a freshman at SCAD, I collected chip bags and microwaved them. I have around 100 microwaved chip bags. Until I know how to mount them, I will only tell the world about them, but it has been a project deep in the back of my mind that I know I have to complete.

Photography courtesy of Hannah Buechler

3. Fashion

I have loved clothes since I knew how to dress myself. My parents both appreciated clothes and fashion, so I grew up watching how they dressed and always felt inspired to look good and feel good in clothes. I don’t think it surprises anyone who knows me that I’ve worked in fashion for the last five years as Libertine’s surface designer. Even when I was younger, I can remember being inspired by specific collections: Karl Lagerfeld collections with Chanel: Pre-Fall 2012 Paris-Bombay and Pre-Fall 2014 Paris-Dallas. All of Alexander McQueen’s work, from the theatrical sets to the clothes (No. 13 Paint Dress Finale, Spring/Summer 1999). Growing up, I loved feeling and seeing the colorful textiles in department stores, especially the Chanel tweeds.

Photography courtesy of Hannah Buechler

4. Collecting

I have always had a knack for collecting, as many people do. I have a white Panasonic VHS TV and love creating “tape towers” in corners of my room. My cigar boxes hold different materials: colored pencils, colored pencil shavings, pens, paint scraps, resin scraps, etc. One of the first things I started collecting as a kid was vinyl after being gifted The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as well as The Rolling Stones’ Undercover. My newest obsession is Kieselstein-Cord handbags, a brand that is niche and ornate, with gold, animalistic details like crocodile feet on the bottom of a handbag.

Photography courtesy of Hannah Buechler

5. My dog, Stevie

Stevie, aka Steve, is my 9-year-old Boston Terrier child. She has lived with me all over the world, from Savannah to Paris and San Diego to New York, and now in Los Angeles. She has traveled to South America and all over the United States with me, being the best and easiest travel companion despite her stubborn personality. She is the strangest, quirkiest dog and incredibly bright yet silly at the same time. She has a funny way of understanding the materials I am working with and what she can step on. She will effortlessly walk around a painting or wet substrate on the ground but will also walk and sit on my loom band pieces.

5 Projects by Hannah Buechler

‘Cosmos’ by Hannah Buechler; 2022–2025, beads, broken jewelry, safety pins, glass, paint, resin, and recycled fabrics on panel. Photography by Spencer Higgins.

1. Satellite Series: Cosmos

Cosmos was the culmination of saved project experiments from college, extensive beading with broken jewelry, and themes of deconstruction and reconstruction, resulting in a large (63 x 48 inches) free-standing artwork that can also be wall-mounted.

I started this piece when I was sick and quarantined with COVID. I had never watched Euphoria before, so I binge-watched two seasons and beaded from my room with no idea how large this piece would become.

Over the four years I spent working on Cosmos, it transformed from a small, beaded textile into an endless artwork full of experiments, including embedded loose material under mesh layers, chain woven between rows of safety pins, and pieces of a beaded, broken vase dipped in resin. Creating Cosmos has made me think of the possibilities of making other time capsule pieces for others. I imagine someone who doesn’t want to throw out certain textiles, materials, or jewelry they may have.

I do look at this piece every day, though, and think about adding to it. I am starting to see shapes form the more I look at it, which makes me want to play off of that and create something more representational.

‘Palisade’ by Hannah Buechler; 2025, loom bands, wool, and felt framed. Photography by Spencer Higgins.

2. Palisade

Palisade was the product of staying hunkered down during the 2025 Los Angeles fires. I needed to create something in order to cope with the disasters around us.

The composition was inspired by my drive home the day the fires started, as I watched the flames rise off the mountains beneath the Getty. Growing up in San Diego, I will never forget some of the times we had to evacuate during fires. I grew up in a town that is filled with Eucalyptus trees, which always pose a threat. I will never forget the grayish-black, thick skies, often with a hint of yellow and orange depending on how close you were to the fire. With Palisade, I wanted to emphasize black, grays, and white, with bright, striking hues. Creating a little moment in the bottom right corner symbolized the drastic color change from before and after the fire.

At the time, my partner and I decided to stay in LA—despite living on the base of the Santa Monica Mountains. We were racking our brains over how to get our work out of our home (my partner is a fashion designer who makes custom clothes for rock ‘n’ rollers like Billy Idol). My family offered to drive up to help move some of the things that we couldn’t bear to part with. When thinking about leaving some of my larger pieces behind—like Cosmos, which was still a work in progress then—I decided to stay. Staying gave me the opportunity to create Palisade, creating something that symbolized a moment in time.

‘Alaska’ by Hannah Buechler; 2022, beads, safety pins, fishing beads, indicators, fishing line, and flatbed crystals. Photography courtesy of Buechler.

3. Alaska

This project brought many challenges; however, the outcome was better than I had hoped. I was commissioned by a woman whose husband caught the fish that is printed on the fabric substrate. The Japanese technique of Gyotaku lets you create an exact, lifelike record of a catch before selling or eating the fish.

Coincidentally, I took this project on a fly-fishing trip to Alaska with my family. It wasn’t until this trip that I really started to see the correlations between fly-fishing and beading. More than just the materials I work with, including fishing line, lures, and flies, beading and fishing are both very patient processes.

The commission took 11 months to complete, and when framed, I wanted to show the extensive beading on the backside of the textile, so I had a piece of plexiglass laser-cut with holes around the edge. This let me use fishing line to sew the fabric into the base of the frame. To secure the line, I added fishing lures/beads to hold the fabric in place.

Contemplation’ by Hannah Buechler; 2025, loom bands, wool, and felt framed. Photography by Spencer Higgins.

4. Contemplation/The Weight of Memory

As the daughter of a biochemist, I think I was inherently fascinated with the human body and anatomy. We grew up with a real human skeleton in our home, named Walter, who probably should have scared me as a kid, but I found the body to be a source of inspiration. Growing up with Walter, I always found a way of tying anatomy back into my work. My first body of work was when I was 17 and in high school. It featured different parts of the body, using different techniques in each piece.

‘The Weight of Memory’ by Hannah Buechler; 2025, loom bands, wool, and felt framed. Photography by Spencer Higgins.

These two pieces were my way of adding representation of the body into my loom band work. These pieces brought many challenges, including letting go of the “freestyle” aspect of creating my loom band pieces. I had to plan and redraw the faces a lot, which was the opposite of how I approach my other works, which tend to be more fluid.

‘Wild Like West Texas Winds’ by Hannah Buechler; 2019, gouache on canvas. Photography courtesy of Buechler.

5. Wild Like the West Texas Winds

In many ways, painting has always been a way for me to be more expressive and representational in my compositions and processes. As I tend to allow color, line, and texture to drive my loom band pieces, my paintings give me a moment to reflect on gradients, repetitive patterns like stripes, camo, and animal prints, flora and fauna. Even though I completed this piece in 2019, it still remains one of my favorite paintings because of the time I had to make it.

The name Wild Like the West Texas Winds came from one of my grandpa’s many quotes he used to describe me. When I painted this piece, my grandpa had just been admitted to a nursing home. I would go to work every day, visit my grandpa, and then come home to paint; this piece was one I became obsessed with coming home to.

I have tried to create paintings similar to this one, but they end up being too chaotic. WLTWTW will always be special to me in many ways.

Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF has made a practice of turning familiar objects into something stranger, whether that means blowing a cartoonish red boot up to near-comical proportions or shrinking a handbag to microscopic scale. For its latest experiment in distortion, MSCHF has chosen a considerably larger subject: two Lexus vehicles.

Photography by Matt Hartz for Lexus

Commissioned by Lexus for MOTOMORPHOSIS, a new exhibition opening during New York’s Armory Week, MSCHF transformed a Lexus RZ 450e and RX 450h+ into a pair of automotive sculptures that look less fabricated than digitally manipulated. Each appears alongside its production counterpart, making the extent of the transformations immediately apparent.
The RZ 450e becomes Circle Car, its body stretched and curved until the front and rear meet in a continuous loop. The RX 450h+ undergoes a different kind of contortion in Twisted Car, where the vehicle rotates dramatically along its length, pulling its windows, doors, and body lines into a spiral.

Photography by Matt Hartz for Lexus

While both might resemble concept cars from an especially surreal auto show, MSCHF calls them “Form Cars.” The distinction flips the conventional concept-car exercise on its head: rather than using an experimental vehicle to explore future technology or functionality, the collective treats the existing automobile primarily as a form to be manipulated.

Photography by Fritz Metayer for MSCHF

That approach draws from the digital tools designers routinely use. Operations like stretching, bending, and twisting an object are relatively mundane inside 3D software, even when they produce geometries that would be absurd in the physical world. MSCHF also points to the “squash and stretch” of 3D animation, where forms distort through smear frames to communicate action. MOTOMORPHOSIS effectively freezes that visual shorthand and gives it physical mass.

Photography by Fritz Metayer for MSCHF

Exhibiting the sculptures beside intact versions of the vehicles reinforces the contradiction. One object is carefully engineered to move through physical space; its distorted double is completely static, yet visually communicates movement more emphatically.

Photography by Fritz Metayer for MSCHF

“Most conversations about electrification focus on how a vehicle is powered. MOTOMORPHOSIS asks a different question: What can electricity power in our imagination?” says Lisa McQueen, senior manager of Lexus marketing. “Working with MSCHF allowed us to take the automobile beyond its familiar form and explore movement, transformation and possibility in an entirely new way.”

Photography by Fritz Metayer for MSCHF

MOTOMORPHOSIS is on view at Chelsea Industrial in New York until Sept. 26, 2026.

Editorial Transparency: This article was developed with the assistance of AI tools, which may have been used for research, outlining, editing, or copy refinement. Reporting, fact-checking, and editorial decisions were made by the Design Milk editorial team.

As part of each Maison&Objet, the twice-annual design show on the outskirts of Paris, a selected group of Rising Talent from a single country presents their work as a show within the show. For visitors—buyers, journalists, architects, and interior designers—it offers a more focused look at emerging design amid the fair’s broader (and often overwhelming) presentations.

This year, the spotlight was on South Africa, with seven designers and studios bringing together the country’s distinctive mix of craft, cultural heritage, and contemporary design. Representing Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, and beyond, the group presented furniture, rugs, lighting, and decorative objects shaped by architectural rigor, family history, curiosity, and even environmental activism.

7 Rising Talent Award Winners at Maison&Objet 2026

These seven designers and studios offer a glimpse at what’s emerging from South Africa’s design scene right now.

Oageng Manana & Tshegofatso Ramothibe of Meetlo Studio

Johannesburg

Photography by Matlhatsi Mogalanyane

Meetlo Studio takes familiar objects—a wine rack, a server—and gives them new forms rooted in South African culture and tradition. “We try to express our work through our African narrative and our cultural customs,” Manana explains. “Our name means ‘customs and traditions.’ So our inspiration is drawn from how our indigenous people used to do things, and also the environment that is around us.”

Meetlo Studio at Maison&Objet, September 2026. Photography by Anne Emmanuelle Thion.

One example is the Abadimu server, whose name means “for the ancestors.” Manana says his ancestors are a source of wisdom and inspiration, but function remains central to the studio’s work, even when a piece incorporates elaborate carving or unexpected forms.

Everything, including the carving, is done in-house, giving the studio greater control over how those ideas take shape.“We can control the narrative and have that uniqueness to it,” he says. “We can translate our story exactly as we want to envision it.”

Ashleigh Lloyd of Studio Lloyd

Cape Town

Photography by Anne Emmanuelle Thion

For Maison&Object 2026, Studio Lloyd presented a new line of smaller, more residential-focused pieces. Ashleigh Lloyd is better known for large-scale, high-impact work for hospitality spaces, including lodges and resorts. Her sculptural seating and lighting are made from aluminum, stainless steel, and synthetic rope that is UV-protected, weather-resistant, and built to last. Now, she’s looking toward the residential market with limited-edition table and pendant lamps.

Studio Lloyd at Maison&Objet, September 2026. Photography by Anne Emmanuelle Thion.

Lloyd believes in supporting and empowering women, sharing knowledge, and cultivating a strong sense of community through her creative process. Her designs use a crochet-based technique, typically thought of as “women’s work,” to create sculptural forms from rope.

“Crochet, through its natural flexibility, tactile quality, and almost meditative rhythm, offers a deeply human counterpoint to the rigidity of architectural lighting,” Lloyd says.

Simphiwe Mlambo

Cape Town

Photography courtesy of Maison&Objet

An interior design graduate of the Durban University of Technology, Simphiwe Mlambo has worked in residential, commercial, and hospitality projects since founding his studio in 2019. A Durban native with family ties to the construction industry, Mlambo considers his life experience central to an approach that balances conceptual thinking with technical knowledge.

Simphiwe Mlambo at Maison&Objet, September 2026. Photography by Anne Emmanuelle Thion.

The collection he showed at Maison drew inspiration from the grass mats his grandmother made. A bench evokes her loom, while wall panels reference the mats themselves and lamps recall the light she used while weaving.

“The whole idea is to take personal experiences and traditional techniques and translate them into a modern context,” Mlambo explains. That extends to the collection’s largely traditional color palette, which he adapted for a contemporary audience. “But it still has that texture,” he adds. “It still has that African-ness. It still has that feeling of home for me, of course.”

Tanisha Neill of NISH

Cape Town

Photography courtesy of NISH

Tanisha Neill began as a dancer, a background that ultimately informs her relationship to space and her sense of rhythm and perspective in her designs through her studio, NISH. “My material definitely drives my design, and understanding the capabilities and sometimes its restrictions is where the beauty of creation and my ideas come from,” she explains.

NISH at Maison&Objet, September 2026. Photography by Anne Emmanuelle Thion.

For a new rug that can also be displayed as a wall hanging, Neill collaborated with a collage artist who works by tearing and layering images from vintage magazines. The final form wasn’t predetermined—Neill initially thought the design might become a textile, but once she saw the finished collage, she knew it should be a rug. Hand-tufted in wool and silk, the piece uses varying pile heights to recreate the collage’s sense of depth and layering, with a mountain landscape and bird imagery emerging across its surface.

Neill describes that willingness to let the material influence the outcome as part of her process: “You see the prototype, then you get it back, and you have to be open to adapting, to letting the piece kind of bring itself to life.”

Martin Tallie & Zani Alberts of DEFT Studios

Port Elizabeth (Eastern Cape)

Photography courtesy of DEFT Studios

Like many creatives, Martin Tallie and Zani Alberts, the pair behind DEFT Studios, pivoted during the COVID pandemic: They began as architects and ended up as furniture designers. “A lot of our influences were stolen from architecture, and we were self-taught in woodworking,” Tallie explains. “Our unique vantage point is that we didn’t have a mentor teaching his ways onto us.”

DEFT Studios at Maison&Objet, September 2026. Photography by Anne Emmanuelle Thion.

That architectural influence can be seen in the studio’s interest in simple forms and pure geometries, though the making itself can be quite intricate, combining traditional and contemporary techniques. The Étagère brune et claire, shown at Maison&Objet, exemplifies their desire to create singular pieces with lasting value. Tallie and Alberts produce everything in-house with a small team, maintaining control over both the quality of the work and how it takes shape.

“We love working with our hands,” Tallie says. “We are designers, but we are definitely makers.”

Karlien van Rooyen

Cape Town

Photography courtesy of Karlien van Rooyen

With a background in neuroscience and a love of free diving, Karlien van Rooyen creates objects inspired by anatomy and the organic forms she finds underwater. “Some of them look like lungs or neurons from the brain, but they also look like mushrooms or coral at the same time,” van Rooyen explains.

Karlien van Rooyen at Maison&Objet, September 2026. Photography by Anne Emmanuelle Thion.

Each ceramic piece is hand-built from stoneware clay, glazed, and fired, while her wooden works are created in collaboration with a woodworker. Van Rooyen begins with a 2D sketch, which is then translated into three dimensions and carved from African teak, a hardwood that bleeds red when fresh.

“Multiple pieces of this hardwood get fused together, and then the large chunks are carved away,” she says. “It looks almost like a brutalist monument.”

Siyanda Mbele of Pinda Interior Design

Durban

Photography by Sinomtho Msweli

A background in engineering and later design led Siyanda Mbele to form Pinda Interior Design. He drew the studio name from the isiZulu word phinda, meaning “again,” a reference to the repetition and rhythm at the core of his creative approach. His work draws from South African Nguni, Zulu, and Ndebele cultures, with pattern informing the shape of each piece and vice versa.

Pinda Interior Design at Maison&Objet, September 2026. Photography by Francis Amiand.

That relationship comes through in the wall hanging/rug Mbele showed at Maison&Objet, which uses a pattern of diamonds and triangles drawn from Zulu culture.

Of this imagery, Mbele explains: “The triangle is masculine; the diamond is feminine. When married, the symbols will be stacked. The shapes are made into beaded bracelets, and a woman will give one to a suitor she is interested in. He will wear the bracelet to prove he accepts and wants to spend his life with her.”

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The 2026 Rising Talent Awards jury included Alan Hayward and Garreth Van Niekerk, co-artistic directors of Decorex Africa and 100% Design Africa; interior architect, design researcher, and academic Juliet Kavishe; furniture and lighting designer Thabisa Mjo; and interior designer Donald Nxumalo, who served as creative director of Design Joburg in 2020. The South African edition of the Rising Talent Awards was presented through a new collaboration between Maison&Objet and Decorex Africa.

Bvlgari’s serpent has spent decades wrapped around wrists, fingers, and necks. Now, it’s winding its way through the New York City landscape.

Opening Sept. 10 on the High Line, auruBOROS – Urban Memory and Collective Dream is Bvlgari’s first public art installation in the United States. Commissioned as part of the house’s ongoing Serpenti Infinito project, the work was conceived by Berlin-based artists Marco Canevacci and Yena Young of Plastique Fantastique.

Photography courtesy of BVLGARI

The duo is known for pneumatic installations that use air to create immersive, often surreal additions to existing architecture. For auruBOROS, that approach takes the form of enormous golden coils that appear to emerge from beneath The Standard hotel before moving into the elevated landscape of the High Line. The effect falls somewhere between sculpture and architecture: a gleaming foreign object inserted into the familiar infrastructure of Manhattan.

Photography courtesy of BVLGARI

“auruBOROS began with the ancient image of the ouroboros, but instead of keeping the serpent as a closed circle, we opened it and allowed it to enter the city,” Canevacci and Young tell Design Milk. “Its gold, reflective body moves through the High Line, absorbing buildings, vegetation, people, weather, light, and sky into its surface.”

That reflective surface means that the sculpture changes continually with its surroundings: Buildings and greenery mingle with passing visitors, while shifts in weather and daylight alter the work throughout the day.

Photography courtesy of BVLGARI

Despite its imposing scale and seemingly solid presence, auruBOROS will exist on the High Line for just 11 days. “Although it appears monumental, the entire structure exists through air and is temporary,” the artists explain. “We were interested in that contradiction: something that looks precious and permanent but is actually light, fragile, and transient.”

Photography courtesy of BVLGARI

auruBOROS – Urban Memory and Collective Dream is on view Sept. 10–20 on the High Line at Little West 12th Street in New York City. Alongside the installation, Bvlgari is debuting three Serpenti Tubogas high-jewelry pieces and an exclusive minaudière inspired by New York’s artistic history, all available at select boutiques this month.

Editorial Transparency: This article was developed with the assistance of AI tools, which may have been used for research, outlining, editing, or copy refinement. Reporting, fact-checking, and editorial decisions were made by the Design Milk editorial team.

For a dog whose everyday wardrobe consists of little more than a red collar, Snoopy has developed a surprisingly impressive fashion résumé. Over the decades, designers including Chanel, Hermès, Dior, Armani, and Givenchy have dressed the Peanuts character, with some of those creations appearing in a 1990 exhibition at the Louvre in Paris. Now, a new generation of designers is getting its turn.

Courtesy of Peanuts Worldwide

Opening Sept. 2 in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, Snoopy in Style NYC brings together archival fashion, new designer commissions, and installations exploring the Peanuts character’s influence across fashion, sports, music, and popular culture. The 16,000-square-foot exhibition follows a previous presentation in Paris, but expands the concept for New York with 10 immersive zones curated by The Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center.

Snoopy and Woodstock designs by BODE. Courtesy of Peanuts Worldwide.

Fashion is at the center of the exhibition, with BODE, Christopher John Rogers, Coach, Collina Strada, GAPStudio designed by Zac Posen, Kith, Levi’s, LUAR, Sandy Liang, and others creating new looks for Snoopy and Woodstock.

Snoopy and Woodstock clothing designed by STAPLE. Courtesy of Peanuts Worldwide.

“They all have a way of interpreting looks for him that display some semblance of their own taste, but give Snoopy the personality and style he deserves,” explains Melissa Menta, SVP of global brand and communications at Peanuts, adding that the designers were given complete freedom in their interpretations.

Courtesy of Peanuts Worldwide

By placing archival pieces alongside the new commissions, Snoopy in Style NYC also creates a timeline of sorts, showing how different generations of designers have interpreted the same deceptively simple character.

“Snoopy is the only character who can claim a decades-long relationship with designers dating back to the early ’80s,” Menta says. “It’s been incredible to see designers embrace designing for Snoopy and see how they make him ‘their own’ with their designs.”

Courtesy of Peanuts Worldwide

That adaptability may have something to do with Snoopy’s original design. Charles M. Schulz gave him relatively few visual ingredients to work with: a white body, black ears and nose, and an economical hand-drawn line. What Snoopy lacks in visual complexity, however, he makes up for in personality.

“What I think is really at the heart of it for designers is the simple art and beauty of Charles Schulz’s line,” Menta explains. “That, coupled with the multi-faceted personality of Snoopy, makes it easy for designers to want to make their own mark.”

Courtesy of Peanuts Worldwide

Beyond fashion, the exhibition features a dedicated tennis installation that explores Schulz’s relationship to the sport, including his friendship with Billie Jean King and his advocacy for Title IX and the Women’s Sports Foundation. Joe Cool’s Listening Lounge turns to another part of Peanuts history, celebrating the music of Vince Guaraldi through a DJ booth, rare albums, archival material, and music-inspired merchandise. The New York edition also highlights the comic strip’s link to the city, including the fact that the newspaper syndicate that originally debuted Peanuts was based there.

Courtesy of Peanuts Worldwide

For a character first drawn in 1950, Snoopy has proved unusually capable of moving between mediums and generations without requiring much reinvention. His costumes change, as do the designers dressing him and the cultural worlds surrounding him, but that spare silhouette remains instantly recognizable.

Designs by Christopher John Rogers. Courtesy of Peanuts Worldwide.

Snoopy in Style NYC is on view at 25 Little West 12th Street in New York City until Sept. 26.

Editorial Transparency: This article was developed with the assistance of AI tools, which may have been used for research, outlining, editing, or copy refinement. Reporting, fact-checking, and editorial decisions were made by the Design Milk editorial team.