The untimely loss of Virgil Abloh last year was a huge tragedy to the fashion industry and beyond, but the Brooklyn Museum is making sure that the late visionary’s legacy will live on this summer with a new survey exhibition.
The exhibit, titled ‘Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech,’ will debut on July 1, 2022 and continue through to January 29, 2023, showcasing Abloh’s many creative endeavours throughout his life. The retrospective builds on the artist’s 2019 exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, which was the first to cover Virgil. ‘Figures of Speech,’ curated by Michael Darling and Antwaun Sargent, will be the first exhibition on Abloh since his death in 2021.
As the Brooklyn Museum said in the announcement of their 2022 exhibition schedule last week, his prolific work helped “reshape notions of contemporary fashion, art, commerce, design and youth culture.” Abloh was also a supporter of diversity and inclusiveness, and he assisted in paving the way for emerging creatives. For instance, 200 pairs of Louis Vuitton Nikes that he designed were recently auctioned to raise money for the ‘Post-Modern’ Scholarship Fund that he launched. Abloh was an influential trailblazer and his impact on the fashion industry will be remembered forever.
While the Brooklyn Museum hasn’t revealed many details about the upcoming exhibition, we can expect to see a mix of fashion, large-scale sculpture, immersive spaces, videos, and sketches spanning nearly two decades of Abloh’s career, which means personal art and pieces from his time at Louis Vuitton, Off-White™, Nike, and much more. The variety of different mediums is itself a testament to Abloh’s versatility: he began as the artistic director of Kanye West‘s creative agency Donda in 2010 and rose through the ranks to become the artistic director of Menswear at Louis Vuitton, accomplishing an incredible amount in the process.
If the retrospective is anything like the museum’s recent ‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ display, you can expect a Virgil Abloh-infused spectacle unlike any other, bursting with his creative spirit.
‘Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech’ is set to open July 1, 2022 at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn.