What’s Happening: The multitalented artist is pulling up the curtain on a sweeping retrospective that takes up the entire New Museum, tracing her transformative ideas about Afrofuturism and femininity across an illustrious 25-year career.

The Download: Last summer, perched on a wooded hilltop in the rolling hills of Storm King Art Center, Wangechi Mutu’s evocative bronze sculptures were clambering ahead toward an unknown destiny. The centerpiece, In Two Canoe, depicted two botanical female figures in a canoe, their mangrove-like limbs appearing to plant roots in the grass. Mangroves, which can flourish all over the planet and migrate to new habitats, are an apt metaphor for Mutu’s practice—and symbolize how the artist has sculpted her own trajectory.

In 2015, Mutu started dividing time between New York, where she lived since the mid-1990s, and Kenya. Returning to her home country helped galvanize a shift away from the collage-based works that sealed her fame, allowing her to explore other mediums, especially large-scale sculptures like In Two Canoe that explore the intersection of Afrofuturism and femininity. “If a plant has just one root,” she told the New York Times, “that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to stand straight and strong. The idea of having many roots, of having your feet really grounded in different places, is extremely empowering for me.”

That mantra has borne fruit for Mutu, who tomorrow is unveiling an ambitious career retrospective, called “Intertwined,” at the New Museum. More than 100 works create an all-encompassing tableau of paintings, collages, drawings, sculptures, performances, and films that trace the intertwining ideas across her 25-year career. These include “transmutation, doubling, ideas of interconnectivity and reciprocity, not just to one another, but to ourselves and our environments,” says Margot Norton, who co-curated the show. “We want to show that her work is consistently challenging her own ideas.”

Revealing the interconnectedness of her ideas calls for space, and “Intertwined” marks the first time the Lower East Side museum has dedicated its entire eight-floor building to a single artist. Expect classics from Mutu’s oeuvre, including a 2003 watercolor collage of two hyena-headed women and Crocodylus, a sculpture that reclaims an overly exoticized Jean-Paul Goude photograph of Naomi Campbell riding a crocodile. Coming full circle is a diptych of a warrior woman decapitating a white serpent with her stiletto heel, which Mutu created for a group exhibition devoted to the life of Afrobeat visionary Fela Kuti at the New Museum in 2003.

In Their Own Words: “My point really is to try to use visual and art historical language and images and objects to flesh out a more African-centric history that predated colonization,” Mutu tells the Times. “And when you start to look at it from that perspective, you see the amount of trade and interconnection, the number of commonalities there are between Kenyan cultures and the rest of the world.

Surface Says: Given Mutu’s previous outings at the Legion of Honor and the Met, taking over an entire museum should be a breeze.

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Join Surface and Blu Dot on Wednesday, March 8, to celebrate the award-winning furniture brand’s new Miami showroom. Guests are invited for an evening of music, cocktails, and light apps, as well as the opportunity to meet Blu Dot’s founders and peruse the new store.

Completedworks was on an upward trajectory—sales nearly doubled in 2021—but the jeweler and ceramics brand lacked a suitable space to showcase its left-of-center, often asymmetrical wares. “We were increasingly having clients asking to see our pieces in person, but felt we didn’t have a space that felt considered and reflected our vision,” says founder Anna Jewsbury. Thanks to funding from the British Fashion Council’s Fashion Trust, the London brand overhauled two floors of a former North Marylebone pub into a pristine new studio, showroom, and workshop that checks all the boxes.

Top of mind for Jewsbury? “We wanted people to be able to enter our world and get to know us, and for us to get to know them.” She enlisted local studio Hollie Bowden, which devised a detail-oriented yet laid-back “ideas laboratory” whose interiors complement Completedworks wares. Folded and hammered cupboard handles, for example, riff on the brand’s crumpled Cohesion earrings. Clean-lined displays, including one upholstered in hand-printed lilac linen, make the brand’s array of homewares and jewelry pop while not stealing their thunder.

“Clients seem to really appreciate the intimate experience that comes with a salon concept of buying,” Jewsbury continues. “They want to meet the designer and the team, and perhaps even have the option to get something that’s more bespoke.” On that note, the showroom will host free monthly classes, including pottery tutorials led by the brand’s in-house ceramicist, ikebana workshops, and a talk on sustainable cuisine by chef Junya Yamasaki.

New & Notable is a cultural catchall that highlights interesting new products and projects from our brilliantly creative members of The List. With new releases, events, and goings-on, these moments indicate their power to move the needle within and beyond realms like architecture, design, fashion, and art.

George Orwell once quipped that “every joke is a tiny revolution.” Ukrainians are proof positive of this notion—the good-humored people have long used jokes and memes as coping mechanisms during eras of political turbulence and natural disasters. The Russian-Ukrainian war is no different. Last year, in late February, a Russian warship approached a group of Ukrainian border guards stationed at a military base on Snake Island in the Black Sea, ordering Ukraine’s surrender. “Russian warship, go fuck yourself,” the guards responded.

The act of courage has come to symbolize Ukraine’s irreverent attitude toward Russian aggression so much that the Ukrainian Postal Service (Ukrposhta) released a postage stamp depicting a Ukrainian soldier flipping the bird to an approaching ship. Since the conflict broke out one year ago, Ukrposhta has staged contests online to source artwork for postage stamps in order to raise money for the armed forces, releasing more than 30 custom stamps by both amateur and professional artists.

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Founded in 1966, Gufram produces some of the world’s most recognizable radical design staples. Under Charley Vezza’s creative direction, the brand has revitalized its catalogue through collaborations with famous designers and brands to keep the radical spirit alive.

Surface Says: Packed with playful irreverence, furniture from Gufram adds a pop to any interior. The brand’s most recognizable pieces, such as the Cactus coat stand and Pratone lounge chair, prove that humor never goes out of style.

A new technology can instantly 3-D print objects using ultrasound holograms.

Air pollution may have influenced Impressionist painters like Monet.

The latest Mercedes comes with a touchscreen, TikTok, and a selfie camera.

Robert Rauschenberg’s former New York home officially opens to visitors.