In Nora Maité Nieves’ paintings, architectural materials aren’t just identity markers, but tools of transformation that stretch what canvas might contain. Her dense yet airy layers of media take in everything from acrylic and Flashe to coarse pumice modeling paste, referencing blueprints and sedimentary layers without sentimentality.

This winter, Nieves is the Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence at the Norton Museum of Art in Florida. The institution is also hosting her first solo museum exhibition, aptly titled “Clouds in the Expanded Field,” through April 28. Recently, Nieves has begun exploring translating her paintings into video, resulting in the stop-motion animation short Eyes of the Sea, which will air on the screens of Times Square every midnight in February as part of Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment. Just before the year ended, Nieves called Surface to talk about occupying space, planning ahead, and making memories into materials.

Your show includes paintings, but also new video work made from the paintings. What inspired the move to video?

I wanted to change the temperature of Times Square and bring Puerto Rico’s warm presence. I started with my paintings’ breezeblocks and imagined looking through them at the sea. That’s my fantasy in the video—they become eyes and fish, and then people who start dancing on Colonial tile floor, which is common in Puerto Rico. Things have special meanings for me that the viewer doesn’t necessarily have to know. Those motifs become special for each person.

Has setting them into motion affected your painting?

It opened up an entire story. With the video, I can explore and occupy a space differently. My work is very sculptural, even when it’s 2-D. It has texture and physicality through materials. It’s always been a search for me—how can I take the painting from the wall to the floor?

Is the work you’re making for the residency different because you’re making it there instead of in New York?

Florida feels like Puerto Rico in terms of architecture, and it references similar landscapes. I adjust to any environment, but I have to plan the paintings because I make a lot of layers and need to know what’s going to come first and after to create the effects. They change in the process. I sketch and take measurements to decide the shape specifically. I start painting in acrylic and I cut them into pieces like a floor pattern or garden. There are a lot of planning layers, and sometimes in the process I need a bold move. Sometimes I wish I could start painting without knowing what will happen, but I need to know what direction the work will go.

Motifs carry through your work, like breezeblocks and Colonial tile—when did those become meaningful to you?

In 2008, I moved from Puerto Rico for my master’s degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before that, my paintings dealt with the idea of paintings as objects. The materials were seductive—shiny and glossy and referencing candy, seducing the viewer. That talked about desire. When I moved, I wanted to question my work, so I mapped all the places I’ve moved. I made 20 floorplan drawings of everywhere I’ve lived, and that shocked me. I realized a lack of sense of ownership and that sense of belonging.

My interest in painting to occupy space had a connection to my lack of ownership and always moving. I was able to remember the floor tile and the apartments’ details. I thought, “there’s something beautiful and visual here.” I started making paintings from those memories, but I didn’t want to go to Home Depot and buy tiles, I wanted to make the tiles. It was very important to translate the visual memory to my hands and my materials. I reference very specific things, but I extract, edit, and transform those things. That’s where my conversation with abstraction is.

How so?

Coming from Puerto Rico with a specific identity and colonial background is always in the back of my head as something expected from us and to be worried about. Many artists from Puerto Rico are working on abstraction and fighting to find freedom in the same way as artists who really address identity in a more representational way. I want to use these elements and talk about where they come from, but they can also be open references. I want the work to be open. If everything disappears and my painting is found in a post-apocalyptic world, I want the work to say something, even if it doesn’t have the history anymore of what happened or where it came from. It will be if the work can stand alone.

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Tucked into the Tributary Hotel on the main street of the heart of Oregon’s wine country, Okta harvests the richness of local lands for a tasting menu that could only be created here. Hacker oriented a trio of dining spaces around a basal erratic that arrived in the surrounding Willamette Valley some 10,000 years ago via the Missoula Floods and anchored them with an open kitchen and wood-burning fireplace. Hand-troweled walls echo the cozy clouds in the skies above the nearby regenerative farm providing Okta’s produce while the dining room’s white oak banquettes and custom tables were also made locally. The downstairs Cellar Bar grounds its offerings in leather furnishings and terracotta tiles glazed in burnt sugar for a sweet touch.

Chef Matthew Lightner got his start at Portland’s Castagna before working at Noma and earning two Michelin stars at New York’s Atera, so Okta’s tasting menu is fittingly somewhat of a homecoming. Douglas fir and local lichen often figure in the seasonal-shifting lineups, as do potions cooked up in the restaurant’s fermentation lab. But Lightner’s dishes often take flight, like candied buckwheat cereal formed into flower pistils, and mounds of morels infused with alder leaf tea, charred over hot coals in tribute to Indigenous practices of controlled fires. The main dining room offers the full gamut of ten or so courses, while the downstairs Cellar Bar edits the lineup to five or six. Both may be accompanied by wine curator Ron Acierto, with pours of Oregon pinot noir and chardonnay served in handblown Zalto glassware.

Our weekly scoop on industry players moving onwards and upwards.

Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec emerged as product design wunderkinds at the turn of the millennium, before either of the French brothers had even turned 30. (Ronan, five years older, was discovered after his prototype for a modular kitchen caught Giulio Cappellini’s eye at a Paris fair.) Despite their position as some of France’s most illustrious design stars whose rigorous yet approachable creations have become mainstays of Flos, Kvadrat, and Vitra, their professional relationship with each other has lately been marked by creative differences.

The siblings recently announced their partnership would come to an end, a move made official by the vacating of their shared studio in Paris’s 10th arrondissement and settling into individual spaces nearby. “It’s really an organic happenstance,” Ronan told the New York Times; Erwan likened their duality to “a burning energy” whose “pressure was not possible anymore for us to cope with.” It’s tough to predict how separation will shape their respective practices, but the brothers have become comfortable with solo work. Ronan’s drawings and ceramics currently star in a Galerie Kreo exhibition until Jan. 13, and he recently published an eponymous Phaidon volume filled with hundreds of his snaps from his Instagram; Erwan was recently named creative director of Kvadrat Shade and debuted a set of column-like luminaires for Flos.

When: Until Feb. 11

Where: Museo Jumex, Mexico City

What: Curated by New Museum director Lisa Phillips, this show spans the entirety of Museo Jumex to explore the evocative attributes of light and lightness. Illumination, weightlessness, immateriality, and even humor are among the attributes explored by 67 contributing artists. Among them, Abraham Cruzvillegas’s installation of found objects (pictured) expertly captures the essence of the show, which was organized to mark the museum’s tenth anniversary.

The Swedish purveyor of womenswear rang in the 30th anniversary of her eponymous label (co-founded by Knutsson with Karin Hellners and Patrik Kihlborg) with a limited-edition coffee table book photographed by Engstrom. Anyone lucky enough to acquire one of the 500 copies will find a visual archive of Filippa K garments and accessories dating back to the label’s emergence in 1993, as well as never-before-seen archival photographs of Engstrom’s. Consider it a must for anyone who truly did love Scandi style before it was cool. $65

Submaterial creates thoughtful and precisely handcrafted design pieces for modern interiors. In their simplicity and beauty, these works explore the territory between objects of art and objects of design. Submaterial has always focused on natural and sustainable materials such as wool felt, cork, wood, and leather. These materials are fashioned by hand into beautifully surfaced wallcoverings, panels, and screens by skilled fabricators using environmentally conscious and lean manufacturing processes.

Surface Says: Submaterial harnesses the elegance and beauty of natural materials like wood, leather, and wool to create its selection of handcrafted artwork and décor.

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