Since the 1980s, Catherine Opie has been equally, and rightfully, beloved as a photographer who has invited us to see what others fight to keep hidden (the existence of queer bodies, the dignity of non-nuclear families) and what’s lingering beneath what we see everyday (highways emptied of their endless traffic, surfers between their tides). This summer, she’ll spend some time looking back—the São Paulo Museum of Art will install a retrospective of her work, but she’ll also bring new photographs to Lehmann Maupin gallery in Manhattan.

“Walls, Windows, and Blood,” named for what she calls the “holy trinity” in the series, collects images Opie made while exploring an uncharacteristically empty Vatican City during the fraught summer of 2021, when she was the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography at the American Academy in Rome. Smaller-than-live documentations of Vatican border walls prop themselves against the gallery walls, resting upon pink marble steps. Pigment prints of the view from every Vatican window alternate with grids of close-up shots of each depiction of blood in the Vatican’s art collection, a visual reminder of the church’s power and dominance throughout history. The result is empathetic and claustrophobic, a gripping investigation into the architecture of spiritual power and inclusion versus exclusion.

Opie recently took Surface on a walk through the exhibition and talked about her relationships to the church, her view on afterlife, and the need for revelation.

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After blockbuster landings from Monaco to Mexico City, Qatar’s first iteration of the famed Beefbar sets sail across a pair of floors within the Lusail Yacht Club. Humbert & Poyet launch their interiors with a lobby defined by vegetal bas-relief walls and anchored by a monumental custom desk in Verdi Mediterraneo marble. Downstairs, velvet banquettes form fine dining destinations among the fluted columns, partitions of notched travertine or Verde Luana marble, and stained glass screens. The lobby’s bas relief greenery winds its way towards the ceiling of the private dining room, with neo-classical arched doorways in Verdi Alpi marble keeps things flowing. And upstairs, the lounge thinks pink, with marble panel floors and towering 20-foot-tall ceilings topping the grand, highly decorated ceramic columns.

Custom walnut seating beckons guests onto the outdoor terrace, with its geometric flooring of alternating Navona travertine and Verdi Alpi marble tiles. While there’s not a bad seat in the house, up here offers the best of Beefbar’s panoramic sea views—just the spot to make your way through menu highlights including a Signature Carpaccio with za’tar and maple syrup, a Tomahawk of Wagyu beef, and a Baklava Cheesecake with pistachio and orange zest.

Between them, Parts and Labor Design partner Danu Kennedy and founder Jeremy Levitt have some two decades of experience designing other people’s homes, so it’s no surprise they recently began thinking about what they’d like in a home of their own. The result is the KW 01 Perception Collection, a debut range of furniture and objects they’re previewing at their first exhibition at Materia Studio through February 26, as part of Mexico City Art Week.

Highlights of the collection’s nine pieces include the KW 01 Perceptions Chair, with a sculptured interior of velvet or mohair that arches within a Brutalist-ish burl frame. A Plinth in burl or aluminum stands ready to display a favored object, or simply its own elegant form, while a floor lamp and table lamp offer plinths that gently cantilever lighting elements at the summit. “Our pieces are kinetic, an ode to conversation, to discovery,” Kennedy says, noting that they will be shown in dialog with the accomplished Mexican sculptor Jorge Yázpik. “They awaken and invigorate your energy.”

Barbora Žilinskaitė creates very “bodily” furniture—sculptural pieces seemingly made of plump, cartoonishly exaggerated human limbs that fit together like puzzle pieces. After feeling stifled by the confines of traditional design education, the Lithuania-born talent sought to imbue everyday objects with corporeal features that pique the imagination and spur the uncanny feeling that the objects we surround ourselves with may have a life of their own.

The Center for Art & Advocacy has announced the sixth class of its Right of Return Fellowship: Antwan Williams, Gary Tyler, George Morton, Kendra Ware, Omari Booker, and Rahsaan Thomas. Launched in 2016 by artists Jesse Krimes and Russell Craig in partnership with the Soze Agency, the fellowship is the first to offer support and mentorship to previously incarcerated artists with an annual $10,000 award in unrestricted funds and $10,000 in project development funds. The award also provides resources and community to the fellows to support creative projects focused on transforming criminal, legal, and immigration systems.

In other people news, Bruno Vinciguerra is stepping down as Bonhams’ global CEO and executive chairman after leading the auction house for five years; it will be led by executive chair Hans-Kristian Hoejsgaard until a new successor is named. Aaron Seeto has been appointed as deputy director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He served as founding director of Jakarta’s Museum MACAN since 2016. Stephen Burks was named the first recipient of the new Bruno Mathsson Design Residency, which will allow him to explore the extensive furniture industry in Jönköping, Sweden, over one month.

When: Until June 30

Where: Blanton Museum of Art, Austin

What: The University of Texas institution gathers mid- to late-career prints, weavings, and functional objects from the final 40 years of the late luminary’s life. Though Albers had sought to study painting at the Bauhaus, it was her experience in the school’s weaving program that fueled her dedication to abstraction—a cornerstone of both her textile and printmaking practices. Viewers can expect to see a melange of Albers’s wall hangings, rugs, and other textiles, along with her prints and the commercial and functional objects they went on to inform. The show’s centerpiece is, arguably, not even something she created: her own loom.

ALMA Communications is a Latin-owned and female-run arts and culture firm in New York City, operating at the intersection of contemporary art, social change, partnerships, and innovation. ALMA approaches communications and partnerships with an emphasis on collaboration and humanism, treating each project with the utmost care.

Surface Says: With the firm’s art-world expertise, it’s no wonder high-profile galleries and institutions like FLAG Art Foundation, Jack Shainman, Nicola Vassell, and Creative Capital choose ALMA.

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