What’s Happening: The beloved nomadic gallery puts down roots in Mexico City’s most famous party house.

The Download: In 1936, the arts patron and publicist Federico Sánchez Fogerty and his wife Magda initiated a series of parties in their home, known as the Red Palace of Tacubaya for its sanguine color scheme. Everyone in Mexico City who was, or longed to be, anyone—poets, politicians, artists, critics—would scramble for an invite to bashes like the Empire of Illusion, the Great Saturdays, or the Teas Crazy. These festivities, which came to be known as the Parties of Third Empire, went on through the 1970s. They established the 6,450-square-foot colonial house as an epicenter of Mexico City’s cultural movements through the 20th century.

This year, the house once again becomes a home for cultural innovation as the first permanent location for MASA Galeria. Founded in 2018 by a quintet of creative forces including Héctor Esrawe, Age Salajõe, Brian Thoreen, Isaac Bissu, and Roberto Diaz, the gallery is known for shows that form cracks in the walls between art and design, in spaces that expand ideas of what and where a gallery might be. From early shows in neglected mansions to a beguiling group outing curator Su Wu installed in a ghostly post office deep in the belly of Rockefeller Center, MASA eschews the typical white box. (Unless it belongs to Sotheby’s, who showed eight of their artists in the East Hampton gallery last summer.)

MASA began looking for something stable in 2022. “The search took a little bit of time,” Salajõe tells Surface. But the gallery was familiar with the legendary Third Empire location: “It was filled with personalities, particularly those who contributed to the making of modern Mexico in the fields of the visual arts, literature, architecture, advertising, and industry.” It also featured vast corridors and soaring 16-foot-tall ceilings. “The historic aspect of the space was relevant for us,” she says, “but also its original features were playing an important role.”

A pair of shows inaugurate the new space. Brian Thoreen’s “Non-Zero-Sum” offers monumental raw cast beeswax candles, ribbons of rubber piled into tables, lighter-than-air seating crafted of two tones of neoprene, and charcoal-on-paper landscapes of binary code. Mario García Torres pays tribute to Bruce Nauman with A Cast of the Space Under My Chair (2022), which enlists the titular process Nauman used to make his famously unusable stool, and the same name, to create a coated aluminum task chair that’s ready for business. For The Work I Painted This Monochrome While Repeatedly Listening to Gasolina by Daddy Yankee, he attached LEDs to canvas in a sort of duet with the reggaeton classic, perhaps turning the frames into mute speaker enclosures, or a light show viewed from miles away.

And while the hordes of art aficionados Fogerty would’ve surely courted will show up from thousands of miles away when MASA opens in time for Latin American art fair Zona Maco, these first shows by two of Mexico’s brightest assert the gallery’s devotion to the country it finally permanently calls home.

In Their Own Words: “We are extremely thrilled to have found the perfect first location for the gallery in the heart of the city,” Salajõe says. “It’s the next phase for MASA.”

Surface Says: MASA’s shows are unparalleled in their provocations, but with a new home as notorious as this, we can’t wait to see the parties.

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One might not expect the origin story for a pop-up hotel in a 13th-century Italian palazzo to begin with a trash can. But here’s how it happened: a cylindrical bin Danish metalsmith Holger Nielsen designed in 1939 for his wife’s hair salon became a highlight of the permanent design collection at MoMA. It inspired a full industrial design brand, Vipp, and a portfolio of six hospitality experiences. This year, Vipp Hotel’s seventh location will open during Salone del Mobile in the Palazzo Monti, an artist’s residency in Brescia run by the art collector and curator Edoardo Monti.

The first floor hosts the residence, designed with a Scandinavian sensibility by Julie Cloos Mølsgaard. Vipp products, including a matte black modular kitchen and the new Monti Edition swivel chair upholstered in Torri Lana textiles, will come to stay beneath the ten-foot-tall 19th-century frescoes, while art pieces made by 200 artists from 50 countries who’ve stayed in palazzo since 2017 will inspire visitors to make new stories of their own. Booking opens today.

The Future Perfect named the spring show in its West Village townhouse “정Jeong,” a Korean word curator Sandy Park defines as “a collective emotional connection to people and places, expressed through feelings of loyalty, affection, and community.” Works by eight Korean artists explore this notion.

Some embrace brand loyalty: Jinyeong Yeon’s large-scale quilt, for instance, wraps its user in an NBA logo. Others, like Rahee Yoon’s warming color fields cast in acrylic, offer the eye generosity. Traditions passed down through generations also appear, refreshed: A pair of moon jars—Jane Yang-D’Haene’s hand-rolled coil accumulations and Jaiik Lee’s hand-hammered copper iteration—update the ancient vessel, while conceptual furniture whiz Myungtaek Jung goes full-on retro-futuristic for seating of bronze and stainless steel, both chunky and refined. Can you feel it?

“It’s something you have to surrender to,” Nadia Yaron says about her sculptural practice, in which the Hudson-based artist uses chainsaws and grinders to translate small, transient events—a falling leaf, a gentle zephyr—into arresting totems in wood, stone, and metal from her quaint farmhouse studio. Her first solo exhibition at Francis Gallery presents an array of organically inspired works that reflect nature’s inherent imperfections rendered at scales both talismanic and monumental.

Last week, Good Black Art curator Phillip Collins and TRNK co-founder Tariq Dixon teamed up to debut “Molded,” a group show celebrating the materials and traditions that have shaped Black culture and identity. To celebrate the show, New York’s creative vanguard flocked to the TRNK’s showroom to view ceramics, sculptures, and canvas works by the likes of Ambrose Rhapsody Murray and Maya Beverly while sipping on cocktails by Casa Del Sol.

When was it? Feb. 1

Where was it? TRNK, New York

Who was there? Yves Craft, Bernard James, Hamzat Raheem, Alyssa Nitchun, Paris Saad Al-Shathir, and more.

Frank Lloyd Wright is widely regarded as one of history’s great and most prolific architects. By the time he died, in 1959, the visionary designed 1,100 structures stretching over seven decades. But a whopping 660 of those buildings remain unrealized, seemingly relegated to obscurity. Given how he masterminded some of modern architecture’s most iconic hallmarks—Fallingwater, the Guggenheim Museum, and Taliesin among them—it’s difficult to grasp how different today’s design landscape might look if his lost buildings were actualized.

Thanks to a collaboration between Spanish architect David Romero and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, design enthusiasts can finally do so. Romero started recreating two seminal Wright structures—Buffalo’s Larkin Administration Building and the Pauson House in Phoenix—to fine-tune his rendering skills. Their crisp visuals impressed Stuart Graff, the FLWF’s president and CEO, who encouraged Romero to continue the project and publish the renderings in its magazine. The latest batch is stunning: a needle-like mile-high skyscraper along the Chicago River; a foliage-filled bridge to serve as a southern crossing of San Francisco Bay; a rotund planetarium near Maryland’s Sugarloaf Mountain, which Romero thinks would be one of Wright’s most celebrated designs had it seen the light.

Cass Calder Smith Architecture + Interiors is an interdisciplinary, bicoastal practice with offices in San Francisco and New York City. Celebrating 30 years in business, the firm practices boldness balanced with simplicity, innovation balanced with functionality, and power balanced with precision. The studio’s award-winning, modern designs have an attention to detail, materiality, and authenticity that exhibit an artfulness uniquely tailored to the client.

Surface Says: It’s easy to see why the masterful team at Cass Calder Smith are entrusted with the projects for the likes of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Tesla; the practice fearlessly pursues innovation in the face of exacting standards.

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