What’s Happening: As the Golden City grapples with its well-publicized doom spiral, a consortium of business executives is spending $4 million on a feel-good campaign to rescue the city’s damaged image.

The Download: In the 1970s, New York had plunged into a nadir. The city barely scraped through a major fiscal crisis as a widespread blackout provoked looting and arson. Amid the chaos, Milton Glaser sat in a taxi and sketched what would become the I ❤️ NY logo, a Robert Indiana–esque napkin doodle that has since become inextricably linked with New York’s identity. Fast forward a few decades, and San Francisco finds itself in a similar situation. Once a haven for liberals, artists, and hippies, the Bay Area is now grappling with sky-high rents, rampant crime, a homelessness crisis, a drug epidemic, and soaring office vacancies that are prompting speculation about Downtown entering a doom spiral.

Much like how Glaser’s off-the-cuff sketch lifted New York’s collective spirit—a pattern that would repeat itself as the city reeled in the aftermath of September 11, 2001—San Francisco is attempting to brighten the mood. A group of local corporations recently launched a $4 million advertising campaign with the sole purpose of rescuing the city’s reputation. Consisting of the phrase “it all starts here” written in a sleek sans serif font and rendered in the form of a stylized street sign, the campaign aims to reassert San Francisco as a place for innovation and possibility. (“Birthplace of the waterbed and the summer of love,” one reads.) It will appear on 375 billboards, bus shelters, and posters across the city ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, an international gathering of government and business bigwigs held there in November.

While the campaign may deliver brief flashes of feel-good sentiments, it remains to be seen if momentary morale boosts translate to moving the political needle. San Francisco is notoriously mired in bureaucratic infrastructure to the point where installing a single public toilet devolved into a Sisyphean undertaking with a $1.7 million price tag. There’s also the reality that “it all starts here” was created by Advance SF, a coalition of executives from Bank of America, Uber, Deloitte, Visa, and OpenAI. It risks verging on “marketing try-hardism,” a fate that quickly soured New Yorkers on a like-minded consortium’s hamfisted attempt to modernize Glaser’s logo this year. Fortunately, San Francisco’s slate is relatively blank—let’s just see if the executives can secure the right permits to embed “it all starts here” into the city’s consciousness for longer than 30 days.

In Their Own Words: “Tell me where Rolling Stone, the mountain bike, the skateboard, rock and roll, or the computer began,” Rich Silverstein, a San Francisco transplant and co-chairman of Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the agency tapped to develop the campaign, told Fast Company. “The list goes on and on. I wanted to go to San Francisco because there seemed to be no judgment here—anything was possible. I still believe that spirit is here.”

Surface Says: We think Tony Bennett’s signature song is still the city’s best advertisement.

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Self-represented Cree artist Kent Monkman makes the complexities of past and present Indigenous culture a cornerstone of his work across painting, film, and performance. In “iskonikan,” his latest exhibition at Art Toronto, Canada’s preeminent art fair, he addresses the consequences of land theft that arose through the exploitation of Indigenous sovereignty through the reservation system. “Iskonikan” means “Indian reserve” in the Cree language and can be directly translated to “left-over land.” It’s through this lens that Monkman’s works, including mêmêkwêsiwak Trading Post, Giants Walked the Earth, and Constellation of Knowledge, explore the scale and depth of loss wrought by ancestral land dispossession.

Lorena Vieyra’s interior design practice has introduced her to a dynamic array of makers in her home base of Mexico City. But the decorated founder of Vieyra Estudio sought to bring together the skilled artisans of her network—especially those embodying Mexico’s distinctive culture and heritage—to create something bigger. That resulted in the launch of Omet, a new e-commerce platform presenting an expertly curated selection of collectible furniture and objects by makers across Mexico and Latin America. The brand staged a pop-up during this year’s NYCxDesign but recently inaugurated its first permanent retail space in Austin.

According to Vieyra, the Texas capital is an ideal place for Omet to plant down roots. “Austin is a vibrant city with a design scene that continues to grow,” she says. “The city is a place for Omet to collaborate with local designers and creatives, and introduce our unique designs to enthusiasts.” Those include more than 50 pieces by the likes of Pedro Reyes, Héctor Esrawe, Raúl de la Cerda, Marisol Centeno, and Simón Hamui arrayed in artful vignettes across the 2,500-square-foot space at the heart of Austin’s thriving design scene. It’s also a thrilling moment for Vieyra—she’s introducing her first product line.

The French expression “tête-à-tête”—a private conversation between two people—inspired life partners Laura Yeh and Zack Jenkins to extend their relationship to work and launch Tête Studios, an emerging Brooklyn practice promising a playful aesthetic that highlights colors and texture. They’re off to a great start with their debut, a mesmerizing series of hand-blown glass mirrors in subtle shades reminiscent of a suspended droplet of water on a window pane.

Last week, Linda Evangelista and Tommy Hilfiger named German fashion designer Melitta Baumeister as this year’s winner of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. Founded in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the fund supports emerging designers with considerable resources—$300,000 for this year’s top award—and invaluable CFDA mentorship. Baumeister, who’s based in New York, has masterfully balanced creating clothing that feels unique to shoppers yet not alienating in its novelty. Take her latex bubble-hem dresses—or her affinity for metallic, patchwork plisse garments—as proof. Baumeister, whose eponymous line is carried by Dover Street Market and Atelier New York, is joined by runners-up Rachel Scott of Diotima and Henry Zankov of Zankov, who will receive $100,000 and mentorships.

When: Until April 2

Where: Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

What: Mark Rothko’s first French retrospective since 1999 features around 115 works chronologically tracing his entire career. It begins with 1930s-era figurative paintings and urban landscapes before transitioning to a repertoire inspired by ancient myths and surrealism that he used to document the tragic dimension of the human condition during the war. It culminates with his “classic” 1950s works characterized by overlapping rectangular shapes and vibrant colors. Highlights include a series of nine wall paintings commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant at New York’s Seagram Building that Rothko decided to keep and donate to the Tate Gallery more than a decade later.

‘Tis the season to party for a cause, and last week David Zwirner’s Upper East Side gallery put its own touch on gala season by inviting friends out for an evening that kicked off with a private tour of Emma McIntyre’s current show, “An echo, a stain.” The evening honored Doro Globus, associate publisher of David Zwirner Books, and Children’s Museum of the Arts board member Cynthia C. Wainwright. In fitting fashion, all proceeds from the evening—including those from an auction featuring the works of Calida Rawles, Lucien Smith, Tomashi Jackson, JJ Manford, Federico de Francesco, Emily Mae Smith, and Ficus Interfaith—benefitted the museum’s Emergency Arts Education Fund to the tune of $250,000.

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Dedon’s story begins with a pioneering idea and an inspired vision. The idea—to create handwoven furniture using a sophisticated synthetic fiber, weather-resistant and aesthetically refined—revolutionized the outdoor market. The vision of outdoor living rooms furnished with the same attention to looks and comfort as those inside the home has changed the way we live outdoors, enabling people worldwide to enjoy life together under the open skies.

Surface Says: Dedon’s architectural, hand-woven outdoor furniture wins our heart for its sense of whimsy. From its suspended loungers inspired by nests to the Rilly Collection’s cocoon-like pool chairs, the brand’s distinctive lens stands out.

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