Seventy-five years ago, New York City Ballet’s founding choreographers established the company and imbued the art form with a speed, athleticism, precision, and musicality unseen in American ballet before their time. For its 75th anniversary year, the company’s winter season builds on that legacy with highly anticipated commissions from choreographer and star principal dancer Tiler Peck, and Alexei Ratmansky, the company’s newly minted artist in residence. This year also marks its 11th annual Art Series collaboration, this one with artist-director David Michalek. Also new: resident choreographer and artistic advisor Justin Peck introduces an intermission to his 75-minute original ballet, Copland Dance Episodes.

World premieres are known to take place throughout the year at the company, but its winter season is generally when New York City Ballet makes the most inroads with the art and design world through its Art Series collaborations and performance tie-ins. Copland premiered this past winter with stage drops and promotional art designed by Jeffrey Gibson. It returned to the stage since then, but debuting it with the new intermission seems fitting for the season.

Copland is one of more than 30 works from the company’s repertory that are immortalized in Michalek’s Art Series installation, SlowDancing/NYCB. Co-directed by Wendy Whelan, the company’s associate artistic director and Michalek’s spouse, it consists of 50 super slow-motion images of the company’s artists at pivotal performance moments. It’s like the fine art version of an iPhone’s Live photo feature: Michalek’s lens captures five seconds of footage at 1,000 frames per second, drawing out the sequence to ten minutes. The company’s characteristic athleticism, speed, and artistry makes for an engrossing performance, but creates a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it effect onstage.

Photography is also at the heart of Solitude, Alexei Ratmansky’s recent premiere, albeit in a deeply sobering way. Ratmansky, who grew up in Ukraine, has been unable to stop thinking about a wartime photograph taken by Hector Adolfo Quintanar Perez in 2022. It captures the image of Vyacheslav Kubata, a father who kneels in the street beside the body of his son Dmytros for hours after the 13-year-old boy is killed by a Russian missile.

On its opening night, the work, which channels the image and that Ratmansky dedicated to the children of Ukraine, evoked a palpable wave of emotion from both the audience and dancers. Set in part to the Funeral March of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony Number 1, there’s a cruel irony to the music’s minor-key rendition of the children’s nursery song Frére Jacques. A virtuosic Theo Rochios, a student dancer at the company-affiliated School of American Ballet, brings a haunting innocence to the work’s weighty context, while a solo from starring principal Joseph Gordon pulls the audience into an orbit of grief so intense that words do it a disservice.

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One of the most mystifying scenes from David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive involved an after-hours visit to Club Silencio, where a man steps on stage and speaks about the power of illusion. A decade later, the famed director would bring the cult venue to life as a nocturnal hangout spot for the Parisian cognoscenti to enjoy late-night music and cultural moments in a surreal members-only club on rue Montmartre, where gilded walls and Space Age furniture set a surreal scene. After branching out to Ibiza and across the Seine in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, founders Arnaud Frisch and Antoine Caton are recreating the energy in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, where echoes of Studio 54 still resonate.

Harry Nuriev of Crosby Studios was tasked with interiors this time, and he deftly fuses the sexy allure of Lynch’s scenography with the contemporary panache of New York City. “I wanted to continue the codes of Lynch, but with my twist,” Nuriev tells Surface, citing Twin Peaks as a key influence. The subterranean club is saturated top-to-bottom with a seductive shade of red—Lynch’s signature hue—that brings out the luster of raised private areas lined in shimmering golden panels. It’s the perfect place to knock back award-winning mixologist Remy Savage’s concoctions like a Manhattan with twists of Pernod. Prepare for programming that highlights the local scene, but the in-the-know New Yorkers already popped off there this past weekend with all-night parties hosted by Purple Magazine and Swizz Beatz, who celebrated his art collection landing at the Brooklyn Museum.

You could say Los Angeles runs deep in the veins of Cuff Studio. Its co-founders Kristi Bender and Wendy Schwartz see to it that each piece of furniture and every wallcovering produced through partner Black Crow Studios are designed and made in California. An earth-toned palette of sandstone, lush greens, and golden hour colorscapes permeate its thoughtful edit of lighting and furniture that seems to pick up where key moments in collectible Italian midcentury design left off. Now that edit is in closer reach than ever with the studio’s newly opened Melrose gallery. The space brings some of Cuff’s most enduring silhouettes, like its Ripple console, wavy Solana chaise, and geometric Facet dresser, together under one roof. What’s more, Cuff is in excellent company: art galleries James Fuentes and Emma Fernberger are just down the block.

Last week, after a series of fits and starts, a SpaceX rocket carrying 125 miniature moon sculptures by Jeff Koons finally departed from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Aboard a lunar lander designed by aerospace company Intuitive Machines, the sculptures—each representing a phase of the moon and dedicated to people who’ve influenced life on Earth—are expected to reach the moon’s surface this week. The initiative, known as “The Moon Phases Project,” will also have an earthly component that involves minting NFTs available through Pace Verso, the gallery’s NFT program.

“I grew up listening to President Kennedy speak about going to the moon,” Koons told the New York Times before takeoff. “It gave our society a vision and drive that we could believe in ourselves and accomplish things.” While the sculptures represent the first authorized artworks placed on the moon, they aren’t the first artworks to be launched into space. In 2021, Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo painted a triptych on the exterior panels of a rocket as part of Uplift Aerospace’s art program.

When: Until April 26

Where: Carpenters Workshop Gallery, London

What: The father of the American Art Furniture movement’s later woodworks, completed between 2011 and 2015, signaled his return to biomorphism, the style he experimented with in the 1960s and ‘70s. After a prolific career spanning nearly five decades, Castle revisited the technique of carving into stacked laminate wood and fiberglass to create the elongated, organic forms of the works featured, which also span materials like steel, bronze, and nickel. They played a critical role in Castle’s practice by showing how materials influence structure and form.

Founded by David Rockwell, FAIA, Rockwell Group is a cross-disciplinary architecture and design firm that emphasizes innovation and thought leadership in every project. Based in New York with a satellite office in Madrid, projects include Union Square Cafe, The Shed (Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Rockwell Group), NeueHouse, and the TED Theater.

Surface Says: Rockwell Group deeply understands theater as much as it does architecture, and the firm’s immersive environments capture the imagination. Whether designing a Broadway set, a restaurant, or a hotel, David Rockwell and his team combine technological know-how with design thinking, creating spectacular spaces and places.

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