What’s Happening: Following the fall premiere of Surface cover star Solange Knowles and Gianna Reisen’s acclaimed commission Play Time, New York City Ballet has entered 2023 with a slate of new performances with art- and design-world collaborators.

The Download: Copland Dance Episodes, an abstract new ballet from the company’s resident choreographer and artistic advisor Justin Peck, premieres tonight at New York City Ballet. It’s something of a generational turning point: Peck’s is the first new non-narrative, evening-length performance to join the company’s repertory since 1967.

For the production’s visual design, he worked closely with the contemporary artist Jeffrey Gibson, whose two massive fabric drops for the performance’s opening and closing curtain recall the kaleidoscopic geometry of his quilted textile art and vibrant acrylic-on-canvas paintings. Drops are traditionally a crucial piece for stage scene-setting, but in a non-narrative work like Peck’s, they instead inspired the variety of color—citrine, turquoise, magenta—in the costumes designed by former City Ballet dancer Ellen Warren. “This ballet world is very different from the world I operate in,” Gibson tells Surface. “Ballet is not like the art world, which kind of thrives on something shocking or different, or that breaks away from tradition.”

For the company, whose box office juggernauts include founding choreographer and artistic director George Balanchine’s Swan Lake and the Nutcracker (both set to Tschaikovsky scores), Copland Dance Episodes represents an evolution at a time when other arts organizations like the neighboring Metropolitan Opera are scrambling to sate an appetite for contemporary works.

Peck has played a pivotal role in helping the medium of dance reach new audiences, inside and out of David H. Koch Theater. The New York Times credits him with pioneering the now-ubiquitous use of stylized trailers to promote new ballets. He has also honed his eye for activating vast expanses of space by choreographing for Broadway and films, most recently Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story (2021). Through his collaborations with outsiders to the insular world of ballet, like the musician Sufjan Stevens, the fashion brand Opening Ceremony, and now Jeffrey Gibson (pictured below), he has kept the art in step with defining cultural influences instead of in a vacuum of its own history and traditions.

Fourteen years into his choreographic career, much has been written about Peck’s signature style, which feels rooted in subverting audience expectations and classical conventions. His collaboration with Gibson, particularly on a work set to four of the composer Aaron Copland’s Americana-inflected scores, seems to mark a new era for how the choreographer is pushing the needle.

Gibson’s opening stage drop is informed by Indigenous architecture as well as his Choctaw/Cherokee heritage and incorporates the mantra “the only way out is through.” He says the motto aligns with how he thinks about politics and social strife. It all seems to show that Peck’s affinity for subversion extends to upending the cultural context of the rah-rah nationalism surrounding Copland’s works and the stereotypes of the Wild West. “I know Justin is aware of these things because we’ve talked about them,” Gibson says.

It’s hard not to see an exciting new post-pandemic chapter for City Ballet. Over the winter and spring seasons, audiences can see 21st-century ballets on 48 different performance dates, including three additional new single-act works by choreographers Alysa Pires, Christopher Wheeldon, and Keerati Jinakunwiphat. Kyle Abraham’s Love Letter (on shuffle) and Play Time, which both premiered during the fall 2022 season, will also return to the stage.

In addition to the performances, the company opened the new year with Shylight, a site-specific kinetic sculpture by Amsterdam-based studio Drift. Multilayered silk cloches, evocative of the skirts worn by dancers, move with balletic grace thanks to carefully programmed robotics. It’s a stunning follow-up to the duo’s kinetic sculpture Ego, which stole the stage at the Dutch Travel Opera house’s production of L’Orfeo in 2020.

In Their Own Words: “Being an artist having come up in New York City, you try to make grand things happen in tiny spaces until you make it and you’re finally offered something bigger,” Gibson says. “It’s one of the reasons why I said yes initially. I was excited, of course, when Justin called me because New York City Ballet really is inherent to the fabric of New York City. The narrative of my work, which has always been my drive, is my want to find unexpected places where I can mark presence and existence.”

Surface Says: Between Peck’s premiere and Kwame Onwuachi’s standout new restaurant Tatiana, we’d say Lincoln Center is entering its era of Millennial stewardship in prolific hands.

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A group of art-world heavyweights are launching Tonic, a fine art platform that aims to provide “a safe and welcoming space” for both crypto connoisseurs and newcomers to discover and collect NFTs. Helming the venture is Susannah Maybank, Gagosian’s former head of digital, and Mariam Naficy, founder of design marketplace Minted, who are serving as CEO and chairman. No less prestigious are the venture’s founding partners, which include Yves Béhar, Brigette Romanek, India Mahdavi, and Brit Morin, a diverse group intended to capture a broad spectrum of perspectives in Tonic’s curation.

Tonic’s first collection, a generative art series titled “Chromesthesia: Ascend” by artist Jaime Derringer, who will serve as the platform’s head of community, drops on Jan. 31. The series sees the Design Milk veteran apply algorithmic disruptions to her original works on paper and digital paintings, generating entirely new pastel abstractions. Derringer’s approach speaks to Tonic’s ethos of bridging the gap between digital and physical—and championing artists who show evidence of the maker’s hand in their work. Tonic will also encourage NFT collectors to embrace physical works: “The growth of a new generation of art collectors is really important,” Naficy tells Artnet News.

David Thulstrup’s warm, homey interiors for Copenhagen’s groundbreaking restaurant Noma made him a household name, but Ikoyi might just be the purest expression of his design ethos yet. Rooted in Britain’s micro-seasonality and spices from sub-Saharan West Africa, the two-Michelin-starred restaurant has cemented its place on the cutting edge of London’s culinary scene thanks to chef and founder Jeremy Chan’s innovative methods. Now Ikoyi is elevating its game even higher with a sparkling new space in 180 The Strand, the landmark Brutalist building that once housed the BBC.

Balance and juxtaposition are prominent themes. British oak tables and chairs lined in velvety leather offset imposing slabs of Gris Catalan limestone and copper walls. Thulstrup compares the effect to being inside Iron Man’s glove—hard-edged materials cosseting a warm interior. The evocative dining room finds synergy with Chan’s transcendent menu crafted with sustainable line-caught fish, aged organic meats, and biodynamic vegetables.

The current winter offering features dishes such as smoked jollof rice, grilled lobster, and lobster custard; mussel and saffron crème caramel; and a clam dumpling in a fiery broth of peppercorns that takes inspiration from Nigerian steamed bean pudding, Moin Moin. “The interior needs to be in sync with the ethos of the restaurant,” Thulstrup says. “At Ikoyi, spices from sub-Saharan West Africa are the foundation of the menu but the chefs have a more global approach, so I avoided specific cultural references and aligned the interior with the intensity and boldness of the gastronomy.”

When: Until Feb. 24

Where: Faena Art Project Room, Miami Beach

What: The nature-devoted artist awakens the lost native landscape of Miami Beach, which once bloomed with mangroves and palmettos and housed a menagerie of creatures. These bygone species now march through her latest installation, a gothic carnivalesque masquerade where the end days loom. By posing questions about hearing the dead and illustrating a sort of underworld, Pettersson reinforces the notion that what we’ve lost will never return.

Plunging temperatures and a transit strike can’t curb the pageantry on the runways in Paris, where high-octane spectacles are stealing the show. Celebrity antics were on full display—Kylie Jenner showed up to Schiaparelli donning a severed lion head, and Doja Cat one-upped her with Avatar-esque devil-red body paint blanketed in 30,000 Swarovski crystals. But all eyes were on KidSuper, the Brooklyn up-and-comer tapped by Louis Vuitton as this season’s guest designer.

In the Cour Carrée du Louvre, Spanish superstar Rosalía rocked the roof while models showed off technicolor hoodies and suits splashed with pithy slogans described fittingly by the French maison as “boyish and surreal.” It was grandiose but cacophonous—and as Angelo Flaccavento writes for Business of Fashion, a distraction from the real forces at play. From Loewe and Rick Owens to Saint Laurent, luxury brands are revisiting defined silhouettes and sculpted lines rendered in blacks and neutrals. It’s a welcome antidote to the oversize, formless shapes that have long reigned in fashion but may be waning.

David Weeks Studio is a Brooklyn-based design studio founded in 1996. A multi-disciplinary designer renowned for his sculptural lighting, founder David Weeks’s minimalist visual language articulates an ongoing and open-ended dialogue between material and form. His genre-defining work is the result of a distinctly hands-on, sculptural process of formal reduction that marries an artist’s sensibility with technical precision.

Surface Says: A talented and incisive designer, Weeks deftly balances true minimalism with levity and discovery in each fixture created by his studio.

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