What’s Happening: With new paintings, an installation at the Western Hemisphere’s largest planetarium, and the tenth anniversary of his multidisciplinary arts and science center Pioneer Works, the creative polymath is refusing to cave into categories.

The Download: In the early 2010s, an 1866 red brick building in Red Hook, Brooklyn, was a former iron works. Dustin Yellin used to stare at it from his studio across the street. One day he explored it, and then began exploring the idea of transforming it into a hotbed for art, performance, science, and community. In 2012, it opened as the massive—and soon massively popular—Pioneer Works. “It was like a hallucination, a fantasy gone off the rails,” he says over Zoom, having only recently emerged from a long exploration of the Sơn Đoòng caves with his friend Bjarke Ingels. “Off the rails, I mean, in a good way,” he laughs.

Today, the building’s three floors comprise studios for science and ceramics, tech and media labs, a garden, classrooms, and ample interconnected performance and exhibition spaces, along with a robust digital presence and Pioneer Works Broadcast publication. “It was a crazy vision,” he says. “But then you have to operate the vision, which means you have to start a nonprofit. You need lots of people to help you on the Board side, on the mechanicals of programming culture at that scale, on making it free to the public. For a decade, a lot of it was just reacting to the dream.”

Pioneer Works continues to expand. “It’s a living organism,” he says. This past September, it reopened with ADA accessibility, air conditioning, and two new mezzanines, and reportedly will open a free observatory this fall. But Yellin is making time to dream other dreams. On April 1, his exhibition “The Politics of Eternity” opened at Jersey City’s Liberty Science Center. A 10,000-pound heptaptych, the piece suspends paint and thousands of print ephemera within laminated glass, and a complex, time-traveling mythology within its concept. “It’s the future mirroring the past and meeting in the present,” he says.

He began with seven pieces of paper taped to the wall in a chevron. “That was the mainframe, and for a couple of years I added things like drones delivering fruit, satellites falling apart in space, a field of mushrooms.” Later, he set up a pair of tables for each piece of paper, upon which he slowly began constructing the sculpture itself. “It was like making a little film,” he says. “A frozen film.”

He’s also been making paintings based on the fascination with caves that also prompted the trip to Vietnam. “Dustin Yellin: Cave Paintings” runs through June 3 at Venus Over Manhattan and comprises new works inspired by ancient subterranean worlds, made of dense, detailed collage and acrylic on canvas. The paintings, he says, “are a psychedelic journey into the minutiae of the surfaces of these geological moments. Within those moments, hiding skulls and animals and dinosaur bones and masks, different sorts of weird artifacts. Sunglasses.”

It’s easy to get lost in the paintings—though much safer than getting lost in the caverns that inspired them—but their surreality can be destabilizing. “They’re very strange pictures,” he laughs. “Obviously, I was looking at a lot of Max Ernst. But I also spent time in these natural phenomena on psychedelics.” Chemistry, like so much of what interests Yellin, is at once an art and a science.

In Their Own Words: “​​I like to see all the disciplines percolate at the same density simultaneously,” he says. “That’s when I’m really jazzed.”

Surface Says: With upcoming Pioneer Works programming featuring Meredith Monk, Isabella Rossellini, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Dynasty Handbag, and Claire Rousay, and his own work blooming into digital and other media, we’re jazzed, too.

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If you happen to be an Italian duchess in need of a little tropical escape from all that dolce vita, there are worse places in the world than the shimmering beaches of Mexico’s Riviera Maya. The rest of us can follow her example and book a stay at Kevin Wendle’s Esencia Mansion, a 12,000-square-foot hotel that crowns the 50-acre estate established long ago by one such duchess in Xpu-Ha, tucked between Tulum and Playa del Carmen.

Wendle, along with artistic director Juan Carlos Gutierrez and architect Petter Svensson, tapped longtime collaborator Giancarlo Valle to update the sumptuous mansion. Valle erected a sculptural staircase and custom designed 20 furnishings for the various suites and villas to complement the locally sourced ceramics and rugs. Artwork—including pieces by Charlotte Perriand, Fernando Botero, and Betty Woodman—was sourced from Wendle’s own collection. Or made onsite: Marcel Dzama designed tiles for the swimming pool while staying at the property during the pandemic, while Humberto Ramirez spent months painting a mural for the speakeasy, which hides, like an Italian duchess, behind a thicket of jungle greenery.

It’s been almost two decades since Elliott Barnes, after helming the office of the legendary interior designer Andrée Putman, established his own eponymous office in Paris. That’s an occasion worth celebrating, and Barnes—no stranger to luxury, having worked on projects for The Ritz-Carlton and Champagne Billecart-Salmon—does just that with a new collaboration with Cristofle that’s sure to get the party started.

His limited-edition Dellipse collection comprises a trio of bubbly accessories. An elegant Champagne bucket curves in all the right places and is the perfect centerpiece for any table. Expecting a crowd? Level up to the Champagne vasque, which will keep a couple of bottles perfectly chilled. When the moment is right, pop the cork with unparalleled elan by wielding the dramatic Champagne saber. All are crafted by silversmiths at Normandie’s Yainville factory in sterling silver, each numbered and hallmarked. But don’t wait another 20 years to claim them: Only 30 of the sabres and vasques will be produced, along with just 99 buckets.

As the founder of Hong Kong’s Studio RYTE, Dennis Cheung approaches a variety of design projects spanning furniture, interiors, and branding with a sense of enthusiasm and pragmatism in order to simply make cities and spaces better places to be. The tight-knit studio isn’t afraid to get its hands dirty—his team constantly experiments with novel fabrication techniques, resulting in breakthroughs such as the sustainable Flax Fiber Triplex Stool that recently took home an award at SaloneSatellite during Milan Design Week.

The Michigan-born artist’s De Kooning–like collages entangle anthropomorphic forms within chaotic layers of haphazard objects and brushstrokes, twisting and contorting our idea of perspective into surrealist territory.

Here, we ask an artist to frame the essential details behind one of their latest works.

Bio: Jo Fish, 26, New York.

Title of work: If Ouch Only Hurt Once (2023).

Where to see it: Galerie Ketabi Bourdet, Paris, until May 20.

Three words to describe it: Ouch, accept, move on.

What was on your mind at the time: Simply working as hard as I could to execute a painting that was the best I could do thematically and technically. I tend to do most of my thinking beforehand. When I paint, it’s more fluid and lucid thought.

Until 2019, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts occupied a scattershot structure that, according to executive director Victoria Ramirez, “was a combination of eight different renovations and additions” across its eight-decade history. When museum leadership found themselves sitting on extra funding thanks to a city bond and a capital campaign, they decided an all-encompassing renovation was in order. They hired Studio Gang—the Chicago firm founded by Surface cover star Jeanne Gang and known for deftly combining engineering and ecology—to create a bold architectural identity using the building’s skeleton.

Gang’s overhaul, which was recently unveiled after three years, checks all the boxes. The firm devised an organic, swooping structure that snakes from one end of the museum to the other and gracefully unifies the campus. “I recognized right away that the building wasn’t organized in a functional way,” Gang said at the museum’s opening. “We wanted to hang on to the core aspects, but fix the functionality. I immediately saw this line that went north to south. When we got that as the primary axis, everything fell into place.”

Design and craftsmanship at Model No. necessarily means making furniture that serves a function, evokes visceral experiences, and encourages a deeper connection to place. In an industry causing prolific and undue harm, design also requires a more conscious approach that considers the impact of every detail of Model No.’s product, materials, and sources, how they make and finish it, and how they package and ship it.

Surface Says: Model No. pieces offer a playful study of geometry and form with a serious commitment to upending the standard for furniture manufacturing.

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