What’s Happening: A recent look at the infrastructure revamps planned around the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games begs the question: Will the myriad improvements get off the ground in time or fall short of expectations? Destruction of Tahiti’s coral reefs for the Games’ two-day surfing competition, meanwhile, is calling the organizers’ commitment to sustainability into question.

The Download: Los Angeles 2028, take note: time flies when you hold infrastructure overhauls to a hard deadline. The Paris 2024 Summer Olympics are no longer on the distant horizon, looming just a few federal holidays away. Since 2016, Mayor Anne Hidalgo has led a somewhat utopian campaign, titled Réinventer Paris, for fewer cars and more greenery and bicycling infrastructure to improve the French capital’s quality of life and carbon footprint. The city’s ambitions include reversing pollution in the Seine, implementing “urban forests,” and realizing mayoral advisor Carlos Moreno’s concept of 15-minute cities, in which all daily necessities are within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from home.

The list goes on. Unlike the structural decay of Olympics past, the Paris 2024 Athletes’ Village, designed by architect Dominique Perrault, will be swiftly converted to housing and a standalone neighborhood—a 15-minute city of its own—once the Games wrap up. Its construction must adhere to a carbon emissions budget; its urban planning is done with climate change mitigation in mind. (Think natural cooling, drinking water in public spaces, as well as climate-resistant surfaces and landscaping). With only seven months between now and the opening ceremony, the blissful Paris of the future ought to come soon. In eight weeks, on March 1, a completed Village must be presented to Paris 2024, but recent photos show it to be very much still under construction.

On the other side of the world, in Tahiti, Paris 2024’s commitment to sustainability and ecological resilience is being fiercely debated. Over objections from both locals and the global surfing community, the Olympics’ organizers selected the island’s legendary big wave break, Teahupo’o, to host the Games’ two-day surf competition. The problem? Instead of using an existing observation tower to judge and film the competition, organizers forged ahead with a plan to create a new, larger tower by drilling into the underlying coral reef. Throughout December, @saveteahupoo documented the damage and destruction inflicted by the construction barges, and building is currently paused.

In Their Own Words: Professional surfer and Olympian ​​Kanoa Igarashi spoke out against the impact of Paris 2024’s actions. “After seeing yesterday’s video, I’ve realized how much damage this ‘new tower’ is causing. I trusted that they would consider the local environment more. But I guess I was wrong,” he said. “All for a two-day event and not much future benefits for the local community. The Olympics is meant to leave the community a better place than before the games, but this action is not showing that in my opinion. I hope we can all find a solution.”

Surface Says: At least the Cultural Olympiad’s poster art is a win.

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On Jan. 5, Phillips will host its first major exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art: “New Terrains” includes works from more than 50 Indigenous and First Nations artists. The show’s curation charts the influences of the modernist, post-war, and Pop movements on the evolution of Native American visual art from the late-20th to the early-21st centuries. Major contributions in the lot come from the likes of Kay Walkingstick, Dana Claxton, Oscar Howe, and Kent Monkman (work pictured). The latter’s inclusion comes on the heels of a momentous fall season in which his work was included in Art Toronto, the publication of his two-volume book The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, and a reading at the Met.

Every day in Miami, the old is made new again. And while David Grutman and Noah Tepperberg aren’t among the city’s nation-leading core of cosmetic surgeons, with the opening of Casadonna the hospitality titans have given one of the city’s most venerated ladies a second star turn. Dipping its toe into the cerulean blue waters of Biscayne Bay, the four-story Mediterranean Revival in the city’s burgeoning Edgewater district was once home to the Miami Women’s Club for nearly a century. Opened in 1926, the project was overseen by architect August Geiger, whose prolific body of work shaped the character of South Florida.

Grutman first pitched the site to Tepperberg on a 2017 boat ride. As one of the most in-demand figures in hospitality, Grutman is no stranger to high-profile collaborations. He teamed up with Pharrell Williams on Miami Beach’s Goodtime Hotel, whose opening party included Kim Kardashian and the Beckhams. A star-studded clientele demands theatrical stagecraft. For that, the partners turned to designer Ken Fulk. “I rarely pass up an opportunity to reimagine a historic space that can be returned to the community as a relevant and vibrant gathering place,” says Fulk, who is no stranger to splashy Miami debuts, having lent his touch to Major Food Group’s Carbone, Dirty French, and the buzzy new Chateau ZZ’s.

In the two years since launching Pierre Yovanovitch Mobilier, the acclaimed French designer’s made-to-measure furniture brand, he’s been busy creating brick-and-mortar galleries where his collections can shine. He opened one this past fall in the heart of Marais in Paris, but recently inaugurated another in an 8,000-square-foot Manhattan penthouse to serve his growing stateside market. Much like his other gallery, Yovanovitch arrays more than 80 of his most notable pieces—as well as new furnishings and luminaires—in artful vignettes so visitors can experience them in situ. As with all of his work, the pieces reflect the finest of European artisanal craft, pay homage to his Provençal roots, and were created with longevity in mind.

Settling into Chelsea was also intentional. “It seems only fitting to open my first gallery location in the epicenter of New York’s art scene,” Yovanovitch says, noting how art is central to his design practice. He often approaches interiors alchemically, pairing custom and vintage furnishings with museum-worthy artworks in timeworn spaces to create arresting scenes whose visual poetry lingers. Here, he pairs never-before-seen pieces with works by the likes of Camille Henrot, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Alicja Kwade. It’s what Yovanovitch does best, and he makes it look effortless, but the unveiling is a milestone moment as his practice plants more roots in a market eager to learn from his tasteful eye: “It’s a long-awaited realization for me.”

The revival of Luna Luna, polymath André Heller’s long-lost art carnival featuring rides designed by the likes of Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring, verges on miracle given how most of the original attractions sat in storage for 35 years after the park closed. It turns out that DreamCrew, which helped bring the park back to life in an L.A. warehouse this season, also unearthed merch created by the original cohort of Luna Luna artists. During the 1987 fair, Heller asked each participant to design their own moon graphic to be developed into T-shirts and posters. These items, unseen for just as long as the rides, were discovered in the first shipping container opened by the Luna Luna team when restoration work began in early 2022.

Newly reissued as the 87 Archive collection, the trove of shirts, accessories, prints, and ephemera comprise the final stock of memorabilia produced for the festival’s debut. Each item was thoroughly inspected and restored by Luna Luna’s conservationists over nearly two years. A second collection toasts the revival of Heller’s dazzling vision by reinterpreting the 87 Archive through a contemporary lens, encompassing a black hoodie, cap, and tote bag. We may never relive the summer of 1987, but Luna Luna’s communal spirit is sure to live on.

When: Until March 24

Where: Contemporary Art Museum Houston

What: In Houston’s Fourth Ward sits Freedmen’s Town: the city’s first enclave of freed Black people. The works on view here engage with the settlement’s history and cultural context with contributions from a dozen local Black artists. They worked together with fifth-generation Freedmen’s Town resident Charonda Johnson, researchers, the Freedmen’s Town African American History Research Center, and Studio KER. The resulting works of photographic and video art, furniture design, and VR capture the history, present, and the potential of Freedmen’s Town if not for systemic forces that conspired against its continued prosperity.

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