What’s Happening: On Martha’s Vineyard, Charlap Hyman & Herrero smoke out the hidden mysteries of New England’s “widow’s walks.”

The Download: As the story goes, the 19th-century interpretations of Italian cupolas found crowning the tops of New England coastal houses were platforms for wives to wait and watch for the return of their seafaring husbands. (Or, hence the name, watch them die trying.) They also served as chimney access; pouring in sand could quench a house fire.

Charlap Hyman & Herrero’s Adam Charlap Hyman has long been fascinated by this fraught architecture. “The railings are a little lower than normal, which makes the roof seem taller. There’s something about their scale that’s instantly appealing,” he says. “And of course the mythology. So they’re useful, but as a kind of folly, they’re also wonderful. They have a way of turning any house into a tower.”

This summer, they form a conceptual core of the firm’s latest exhibition, which fills Martha’s Vineyard’s Winter Street Gallery with incendiary art and design. “Widow’s Walk” brings together work from a dozen artists, making a trail from Pieter de Grebber’s aching, life-size 16th-century portrait Penitent Magdalene to Andra Ursuta’s shroud-cum-meme Man from the Internet 71 (2016) and Eli Ping’s ghostly cotton-and-resin Mote (2023).

There’s smoke: across the gallery walls, Jenny Jesky applied charcoal blurs and smears to fashion impressions of missing work. “Smoke damage had destroyed most of her own house, some ten years ago,” he says. “She took all these spooky images of it. I think she found it cathartic to process that experience and turn it into a world that’s productive as opposed to destructive.” And there’s fire: Alphonse Cytere’s iridescent Flambé Vase (1914–20) performs a similar alchemy to Art Deco effect, while Matthew Leifheit’s modern classic To Die Alive photograph of Fire Island’s Grove Hotel ablaze makes you cry out for sand to throw.

A photograph of interior designer Jean-Michel Frank might make you simply cry. Taken by his lover, Thad Lovett, Frank raises himself from a hospital bed, his eyes so full of exhaustion and affection. His leg is in a cast, beneath a kind of traction that doesn’t not call to mind the railing of a widow’s walk. Like the storied architecture, the photo seems to both mourn and save a life so that we may remember it.

In Their Own Words: “We’re looking for paths that show a tension between recollection and invention,” Charlap Hayman says. “The way something was, when it wasn’t that way.”

Surface Says: “Widow’s Walk” brings a welcome gust of summertime sadness to the Vineyard’s preppy luxe—sadly perfect for a season of uncertainty and haze.

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Name: Hotel das Amoreiras

Designer: Pedro Oliveira

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

On Offer: Planted within the historic Praça das Amoreiras gardens, the Hotel das Amoreiras joins local landmarks like the avant-garde museum Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation and the 18th-century Church of Our Lady of Monserrate (the patron saint of local silk artisans) in one of Lisbon’s most beloved locales. Founder Pedro Oliveira came here as a child and returned with his wife, Alicia Velero, to scoop up a pair of buildings some seven years ago.

They’ve transformed the structures from scratch into one of the world’s most welcoming boutique hotels. Two suites bloom on the top floor, along with 17 quaint rooms offering enviable views of the garden and Mãe D’Água das Amoreiras Reservoir. Below, a breakfast area off the lobby tempts with locally sourced bites, including banana bread from Madeira island and fried eggs with Iberico ham and angel potatoes.

Our new weekly scoop on industry players moving onwards and upwards.

Art Basel has appointed Bridget Finn as director of its Miami Beach show. In her new role, Finn will steer the fair’s direction and expand its network of galleries, collectors, and artists. She previously moved back to her hometown of Detroit to co-found, with Terese Reyes, the gallery Reyes | Finn, which will soon wind down operations. VOLTA Art Fairs, meanwhile, named curator and contemporary art specialist Lee Cavaliere as artistic director.

French conglomerate Kering weathers another leadership shake-up, announcing that Marco Bizzarri, Gucci’s longtime CEO, will depart his role. They also noted Francesca Bellettini, the CEO of Yves Saint Laurent, will become the conglomerate’s deputy chief executive alongside Jean-Marc Duplaix, who previously served as chief financial officer. Zegna Group named former Bulgari exec Lelio Gavazza as Tom Ford Fashion’s new CEO.

The Museum of the City of New York named Stephanie Hill Wilchfort as president. She previously served as the Brooklyn Children’s Museum’s president and CEO for eight years. Diane Jean-Mary has been appointed executive director of the Black Trustees Alliance for Art Museums, which aims to make museums more equitable institutions. Asad Raza was named artistic director of the 2025 Front International Triennial in Cleveland.

Fabrication is fantastic, but it’s really the dye—the deep black of a perfect T-shirt, the iconic indigo in a blue jean, the Barbie pink that’s got us in its grip—that makes an item to die for. Literally: Rivers in Bangladesh run as black as those T-shirts, and are toxic to fish, reportedly from pollution by nearby textile mills. But also, of course, metaphorically, as the dyes that lend textiles their character also lend fashion its desirability.

Anthropologist and textile artist Lauren MacDonald tracks the past and future of dyestuffs in her new book In Pursuit of Color: From Fungi to Fossil Fuels: Uncovering the Origins of the World’s Most Famous Dyes (Atelier Éditions/D.A.P.) She details the difficulty with which traditional dyes were made. Woad, an early blue, required grinding, balling, and drying woad leaves, then fermenting for a few weeks, mixing with urine, and fermenting again. “Elizabeth I banned its manufacture within eight miles of her palaces,” MacDonald notes; she includes a modernized recipe.

Dyes are still stained with histories of enslavement, rapacious capitalism, and ecological ruin. “This book is an effort to reconnect the fluffy pink sweaters to the raw materials and processes that make them,” she writes in the introduction. “Understanding what’s involved in producing the textiles around us might also equip us to make more informed decisions for ourselves and our planet.”

Graham, Anderson, Probst and White originally designed Chicago’s colossal Merchandise Mart—the world’s largest building when it opened in 1930—to be a “city within a city.” It transforms into one every June, when designers flock to its trove of furniture showrooms to attend NeoCon, North America’s largest contract furniture fair. Thanks to recent renovations by Gensler, the building now known as theMART is dialing into that atmosphere even more.

The revamp entailed adding new amenity spaces, namely the second-floor conference center, health club, lounges, and retail spaces, as well as enlivening the South Lobby. Gensler was careful to not obscure the building’s Art Deco roots—details like concrete structural columns were left exposed, foregrounding the structure’s century-long history.

Colombia is seeing a major decrease in deforestation. The government’s efforts, including peace talks with splinter groups, have resulted in a 29 percent nationwide reduction and a 26 percent decline in the Amazon region’s deforestation. President Gustavo Petro’s left-wing administration is prioritizing environmental concerns in negotiations, leading to agreements with some rebel groups to halt logging activities as a gesture of peace. While challenges persist with certain armed factions, experts remain optimistic about Colombia’s progress in protecting vital ecosystems.

Il Bisonte is a high-quality Florentine brand that has been crafting bags and accessories in leather and fabric for the past five decades in Tuscany. These products express a style immune to fleeting seasonal trends.

Surface Says: With their impeccable craftsmanship and hyper-local artisan supply chain, Il Bisonte’s stylish wares are instant heirlooms.

According to these filmmakers, booby traps may help save the desert tortoise.

Jackson Pollock Studio’s first NFT collection rakes in more than $450,000.

Life-size gorilla sculptures are spreading conservation awareness in London.

The world’s cheapest Domino’s pizza costs a mere $0.60 in inflation-hit India.