It’s been a big couple of weeks for Hank Willis Thomas. On September 13, he became one of four recipients of the 2023 Medal of Arts, a prestigious accolade created by the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies program and awarded to him by Dr. Jill Biden. This week, he participated in panels about the role of art in diplomacy and civic engagement at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Not incidentally, the museum is the first stop of the traveling exhibition “A More Perfect Union: American Artists and the Currents of Our Time.” Reinterpretations of Norman Rockwell’s New Deal–era Four Freedoms paintings, created by the artist collective and super PAC For Freedoms (which Willis Thomas co-founded), will feature prominently in the show. Later this week, the Brooklyn-based artist will return to the museum to celebrate his mother, the artist, scholar, and MacArthur Fellow Deborah Willis, as the institution unveils a room dedicated in her honor.

“I’m just following in her footsteps,” Willis Thomas said when congratulated by Surface for his week of recognition. In her remarks, Dr. Biden commended the artist’s role in creating imagery that better embodies contemporary America. A conceptual artist, Willis Thomas enlists media including sculpture, photography and collage to pose questions of identity, history, and culture. Together with fellow artists and friends Eric Gottesman, Michelle Woo, and Wyatt Gallery, he co-founded For Freedoms in 2019, which employs creative expression as a mechanism for civic engagement.

To many, Willis Thomas’s identity as an artist is inextricably linked to his identity as a co-founder of the organization. “Dr. Biden dedicated the entire opening of her speech to For Freedoms, the organization, and the photos,” executive director Claudia Pena told Surface. “She was also honoring Hank, of course, but there’s so much overlap. Any time he’s being honored, For Freedoms ends up being mentioned.”

At the same time, Willis Thomas is hesitant to speak on behalf of For Freedoms, redirecting a question about how the State Department’s perspective of art as a “soft power tool” aligns with how For Freedoms views its own work, to his fellow co-founders. To see a Cold War–era diplomatic term used in such a modern and even liberal context might give whiplash, but not to Gottesman. “Because culture is [now] so much a stronger power than it was when the term was created, art is the sharpest tool for cultural shift that we have,” Gottesman says. “It’s moved more towards hard power. It would be difficult to find a diplomatic mechanism or way that countries are interacting with one another that doesn’t involve creative production.”

Willis Thomas spoke with Surface about legacy, artists as “the future of society,” and optimism in the shadow of doom.

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Designing Delicious is produced in partnership with Dorsia, a members-only platform with access to reservations at the most in-demand restaurants in New York, The Hamptons, Miami, L.A., San Francisco, and London.

“It’s a bit of a cliché, but we really like to focus on the best produce,” says Max Coen, head chef at Dorian. The latest outpost of Chris D’Sylva, founder of Supermarket of Dreams and Notting Hill Fish + Meat, Dorian carries on D’Sylva’s tradition of sourcing top ingredients. Occupying the former shell of Notting Hill institution Raoul’s, Dorian is the newest neighborhood hotspot to grace the storied Talbot Road storefront.

Outfitted with black-and-white checkered floors, British racing-green banquettes, and silvered mirrors, the Parisian brasserie-inspired space feels fresh and familiar at the same time. Flames spring up from the open kitchen where Coen, who hails from Michelin-starred kitchens such as Ikoyi, Kitchen Table, and Frantzén, crafts the nightly offerings based on whatever their small army of handpicked suppliers have fresh.

In Turkish, çinili translates to “tiled bath house.” But when Koza Gureli Yazgan acquired an abandoned hamam by the same name in Istanbul’s historic yet overlooked Zeyrek district in 2010, the name puzzled her. “It was nothing,” she tells The Art Newspaper. “The plaster was covered with green mold, and there was all this humidity dripping down the walls.” While freshening the place up, she kept unearthing priceless artifacts from Ottoman, Byzantine, and Roman times, soon discovering fragments of 3,000 vivid turquoise-blue ceramic tiles. More than 10,000 such tiles adorned the interior until a Parisian dealer sold them to museums and private collectors around Europe as the hamam sat dormant.

After more than 13 years of conservation, which involved restoring the tiles and wall paintings dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries, Gureli Yazgan is gearing up to reopen Çinili as a contemporary art venue on September 30. A museum dedicated to Byzantine cisterns will occupy the lower levels, which feature newly uncovered wall carvings of boats suspected to have been made by slaves. When the baths aren’t offering full-service spa treatments, they’ll host a rotating art program that glimmers under the domed roof’s crescent-shaped skylights. First up is a group show called “Healing Ruins,” spearheaded by former Istanbul Modern curator Anlam Arslanoglu, about the building’s manifold layers, the history that lies within, and the stories that remain to be told.

When: Until Jan. 7

Where: Frick Madison, New York

What: Replete with sumptuous portraits by Rembrandt, Bronzino, Van Dyck, and other notable Old Master paintings, The Frick Collection was one of Barkley L. Hendricks’ favorite museums. This fall, more than a dozen works by the pioneering American artist enter its temporary Madison Avenue home to elucidate how he revolutionized contemporary portraiture by depicting Black figures with traditions of European painting. He often set his figures against a monochromatic expanse of color—here, his “limited palette” paintings render his figures’ brown skin tones in dazzling clarity while making them feel approachable and human.

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Kraft Recalls Faulty American Cheese Singles That Might Make You Gag [CBS]

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This week, heavy hitters in art, business, culture, and entertainment came together to celebrate public art and community at High Line Art Dinner, where they enjoyed a late dinner against a summer sunset. The event kicked off with special performances by artists Andrea Bowers, Ryan McNamara, and Nari Ward along the former railway, culminating at the newly unveiled Connector bridge linking to the Moynihan Train Hall. There, a billboard showcasing work by painter Jessie Homer French presented by Friends of the High Line helped shed light on the global climate crisis.

When was it? Sept. 20

Where was it? The High Line, New York

Who was there? Padma Lakshmi, Jeff Koons, Simone Leigh, Cecilia Alemani, Laurie Combo, Mark Levine, Alan van Capelle, and more.

Naba Banerjee heads Airbnb’s trust and safety team, which focuses on curbing unauthorized parties. She implemented an AI system that identifies high-risk reservations, successfully blocking or redirecting 320,000 guests since its global rollout. The system considers numerous factors like the user’s age, proximity to the listing, and timing of the reservation. Despite the ongoing challenge of adapting to new tactics by users, Airbnb recently reported a 55 percent reduction in party incidents between 2020 and 2022. The company’s anti-party stance is also driven by past incidents of violence and property damage, leading to measures like host insurance policies worth millions and heightened security during holiday weekends.

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