What’s Happening: With the help of an Italian activist group, cleaning employees at the Guggenheim Bilbao staged a performance to protest unlivable wages.

The Download: Visitors to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao are often greeted with Frank Gehry’s Postmodernist cacophony of gleaming metallic volumes. For an hour and 15 minutes on Sunday morning, they were instead faced with 12 members of the institution’s cleaning staff standing column-like in a line outside to protest the paltry hourly wage of $5.65 they earn scrubbing bathrooms, exhibition halls, and corridors. The group had been protesting every day for several months, but this time was different. Each participant was wearing a shirt that posed a question: Is everyone’s work equally important?

To organize the demonstration, the group teamed up with Art Builders Group, an activist organization founded by Lorenzo Bussi that protests the low visibility of emerging artists in Italy’s cultural sector. Seeking to unite their message under one gesture, Bussi designed T-shirts that reinterpret one of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, her well-known declarations often projected in public spaces. “Everyone’s work is equally important” and other pithy statements from the series also appear in “Installation for Bilbao,” her permanent work for the museum.

Bussi aims for the demonstration to shed light on the perils faced by institutional workers hired through external subcontracting firms. According to some, that model of employment leads to increased job insecurity in the art world and beyond. This past year during the pandemic, the Museum of Modern Art quickly terminated all of its educator contracts, revealing the challenges faced by third-party workers.

In Their Own Words: “Working as a cleaner in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao means earning €35.04 ($39.50 USD) gross for seven hours; it means having different shifts every day and working up to 51 hours a week instead of the 35 stated in the contract; it means skipping days off to cover all the shifts and not having enough time to rest,” Bussi said in a statement. “Working as a cleaner in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao means being a slave to the policy of subcontracting.”

Surface Says: Try deaccessioning one of your Rothkos and paying your staff a living wage. According to our calculations, if you sell one for $50 million—the price that SFMOMA sold one for in 2019—it’s enough to pay each of your 19 cleaning employees $20 an hour for 131,579 hours, or approximately 16,447 work days.

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Now on showcase at Surface Area, TSAR Carpets’ Paradiso Rug is like a summer sunset—its tender, passing beauty is a particular kind of comfort, and its ephemeral nature makes the occurrence all the more meaningful. That fleeting state of calm is captured and reflected in Paradiso. The complex gradient of soft, candy hues is further elevated with a plush high pile that is beveled and rounded to enhance comfort.

Known for high-quality custom rugs marked by bold use of color and texture, TSAR Carpets—an Australian-born rug company that has studios from Shanghai to London—has made it their mission to craft custom statement rugs that are built to last. By taking unique points of view and wielding unparalleled technical expertise, TSAR Carpets has become a premier flooring source for designers and architects.

Erewhon may be every Angeleno’s go-to purveyor of macrobiotic goodies and $24 smoothies, but lately the Southern California health food mainstay has been pivoting from organic groceries to organic clothing. Earlier this week, the brand announced a limited-edition collection of hoodies and sweatpants made from locally sourced organic French terry in three muted colors. “In creating this collection, we thought about what Erewhon represents,” Alec Antoci, co-designer of the collection and son to owners Josephine and Tony Antoci, told GQ. “It’s more than a market providing the highest quality ingredients to our customers—it’s a lifestyle that people embody and live. This collection is an extension of that belief.”

It’s not the first time Erewhon has experimented with clothing. When the marketing firm Pizzaslime introduced counterfeit Erewhon merch that quickly went viral in 2018 after being spotted on celebrities like Jonah Hill, Antoci dropped a one-off collection that, as expected, also sold out fast. And stay tuned for more: he plans to continue releasing small-batch seasonal drops and capsule collections next year with “mission-aligned partners.”

Situated on the Left Bank, Hotel des Académies et des Arts channels the spirit of the Belle Époque when the building housed the studios of influential artists Modigliani and Fujita. The nascent Parisian studio Lizée-Hugot imbued every corner of the property with an artistic energy. The 20 restrained rooms nod to Van Gogh’s famous depiction of his humble sleeping quarters, The Bedroom, with cream-colored walls, troweled plaster, early-1900s–style checkerboard bathrooms, and custom furniture pieces such as knotty oak headboards and stained bed benches.

Half of the rooms and the lobby ceiling are adorned in Franck Lebraly’s pastel frescoes, a tribute to Cubism and Surrealism, accentuated by the black and bronze greens of the salon’s velvet sofa. A ground-floor workshop takes the artist studio design language and bestows it with purpose. There, guests and students from the Academy of Arts across the street playfully paint, take in screenings, and mix up cocktails from the honesty bar.

When: Until Feb. 19

Where: Patron Gallery, Chicago

What: In his masterful portraits, the Los Angeles artist depicts African American characters from films such as A Warm December (1973) and Feeling Through (2019) with lush brushstrokes on vellum. Each of his compositions reference movie stills that portray scenes of reflection and contemplation, alluding to the spiritual and meditative connotations of stillness—and the reality that society continues to grapple with and rehash the same issues.

In the 1980s, the architect and Frank Lloyd Wright disciple Kendrick Bangs Kellogg completed the Doolittle House, a 4,643-square-foot masterpiece in the desert of Joshua Tree, California. Designed for the artist Bev Doolittle, the sinuous structure sports sandy-hued stone spines and sweeping forms that have been compared to arachnids and UFOs, while embodying the principles of organic, sustainable architecture that define Kellogg’s career.

Kellogg originally added an infinity pool in one of the home’s largest rooms where guests could soak up picturesque views of the desert. The home’s new owners and their interior designer John Vugrin, who weren’t quite satisfied with the intervention and wanted more sleeping space without disrupting Kellogg’s vision, replaced it with a massive 14-foot-wide circular bed that offers a more communal ambience. They turned to Hästens, the Swedish heritage brand known for ultra high-end sleep systems hand-crafted by master artisans. Over six months, they created the largest 2000T bed, which uses all-natural materials, is attached to an African mahogany wooden frame, and whose shape echoes Kellogg’s curvaceous architecture.

New Yorkers have many reasons to love the recently opened UBS Arena in Belmont Park, home to the NHL’s beloved Islanders, but will perhaps most appreciate the stadium’s crop of eight elegantly designed bars and lounges by hospitality firm Goodrich (Standard Hotels, Union Square Hospitality Group).

Among these are the 11,000-square-foot Dime Club, a stylish lounge bedecked in portraits of famous locals like Lady Gaga and Billy Joel that pays homage to Soho art galleries, and the UBS Club, which nods to classic bars like Bemelmans at The Carlyle hotel and is anchored by two showpiece vignettes of autumnal Central Park. Meanwhile, live-edge wood repurposed from trees used during the construction of the arena lines The Speakeasy’s bar top and curvilinear banquettes.

Navigate Design are hospitality experts that turn spaces into stories. From location scouting to full build-outs, the firm crafts world-class design systems that connect with visitors on a visceral level.

Surface Says: Navigate Design is a top-down design firm whose services run the gamut from branding to full-scale interior services. Its high-profile commissions, such as that of Open Society Foundations and Morah in Dubai, have helped establish ND as a force to be reckoned with in the hospitality and gastronomy industries.

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