What’s Happening: The Ethiopian-born painter translates her frenetic abstractions onto a BMW M Hybrid V8 to mark the automaker’s 20th Art Car.

The Download: When Julie Mehretu was commissioned to design the 20th BMW Art Car, one of her first courses of action involved seeing the vehicle—the BMW M Hybrid V8—in motion at a race in Daytona. The Ethiopian-born painter quickly realized that automotive design shares quite a few commonalities with her own practice, which explores themes like capitalism, war, diaspora, climate change, and revolution through the lenses of architecture and movement, often all at once. “Designers, engineers, aerodynamicists, and so many other creative minds are working on taking this vehicle to the extreme,” Mehretu says. Her idea was simple: imagine the BMW blasting through one of her paintings, which acts as a portal and transforms the car into something else entirely.

“The idea was to make a remix, a mash-up of the painting,” Mehretu says. “I kept seeing that painting kind of dripping into the car.” The work in question, called Everywhen and inspired by a photograph of the Capitol insurrection in 2021, was fresh on Mehretu’s mind, owing partially to its inclusion in a current retrospective at Venice’s Palazzo Grassi. To translate the canvas’s swirling color gradations onto the car, she superimposed digitally altered photographs of it with layers of dot grids, neon-colored veils, and the black markings typical of her work. She utilized 3D mapping to imbue motifs of digitization, glitches, and vibration across the car’s contours. The markings are clearly visible when the car is still but seamlessly blur in motion.

BMW has been teasing the next iteration of its closely watched Art Car series for a while. At Frieze Los Angeles, the German automaker programmed the surface of a BMW i5 with color-changing panels that recreated visuals from its 12th Art Car, designed by South African artist Esther Mahlangu. It coincided with a BMW-backed retrospective of Mahlangu’s five-decade career at Iziko Museums of South Africa. In a similar vein, the collaboration between BMW and Julie Mehretu includes a joint commitment to a series of media workshops for filmmakers, which will tour Africa starting next year and culminate in a major show at the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town. Until then, we recommend catching Mehretu’s car competing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans race in France on June 15.

In Their Own Words: “The whole BMW Art Car Project is about invention, about imagination, about pushing limits of what can be possible,” Mehretu said in a statement. “I don’t think of this car as something you would exhibit. I am thinking of it as something that will race in Le Mans. It’s a performative painting. The BMW Art Car is only completed once the race is over.”

Surface Says: We’d be celebrating if our first sculpture was a BMW racecar, too.

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Silk, alpaca, Mongolian cashmere, and New Zealand wool are perhaps best known as cornerstones of a luxuriant winter wardrobe. But with the recently launched Fine Fibers collection, Jaipur Living is making the case for splendidly outfitting the home, too. As the market’s biggest purveyor of handmade rugs, the brand relies on a network of 40,000 women artisan makers in India—from the nine founding partners of the brand’s nascence in 1978.

Each of the 20 styles in the Fine Fibers collection, which ranges from the plush cashmere and wool offerings to lower-pile silk and nettle blends, is made to order, offering the extravagance of individual intention behind each commission. A palette of ivory, ecru, sienna, sand, and charcoal allows the integrity of craft behind each rug to speak for itself. With no need for stunting or antics, the collection seems to draw a parallel to the investment pieces at the foundation of a great wardrobe rotation, with ample integrity of craft to suit those as discerning about outfitting their homes as they are their bodies.

The visual artist and experimental musician opens up about an assemblage made from stained vintage tea towels, and what she has termed the “absurdist stage” created by its frame.

Here, we ask an artist about the essential details behind a recent work.

Bio: Lizzi Bougatsos, Manhattan aka Turtle Island.

Title of work: Is That All There Is (SHOWTIME)

Where to see it: Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida

Three words to describe this work: Eloquent, connotative, river.

What was on your mind at the time: Spills, water, stains, perspective, authenticity, pandemic, preservation, domesticity, late ‘60s, conceptualism, Nancy Holt, freedom, fantasy and escape. Frame within a Frame, existentialism, and comedy.

Last week, a crowd of 350 turned out to raise more than $1 million for Public Art Fund’s annual spring benefit. The organization’s undertakings focus on art in the public realm, making it one of the nearest and dearest to supporters and artistic collaborators for the accessibility of its work. Fittingly, artists including Clifford Prince King, Edra Soto, and Adrienne Elise Tarver staged interactive exhibitions as part of the festivities, with Tarver’s artwork going on to inspire the event’s dinner tablescapes.

When was it? May 15.

Where was it? Metropolitan Pavilion, New York.

Who was there? Martha Moldovan, Taylor Zakarin, Divya Vij, Marcia Santoni, Charles Moore, Kambui Olujimi, Fred Eversley, and more.

Founded in Graz, Austria, in 2013 by Anastasija and Martin Lesjak, 13&9 Design has developed numerous collections from concept to production together with specialized partners in a variety of spaces including furniture, lighting, acoustics, textiles, accessories, exhibitions, and sound design. This creative community is its own label and a design studio for international companies such as BuzziSpace, Mohawk Group, FACT Design, and VITEO Outdoors.

Surface Says: The companion studio to Austrian architecture firm Innocad stands out from the crowd for its science-based, social-conscious approach.

An Eater writer investigates what it actually takes to cook like a tradwife.

Patricia Urquiola designs a trophy for the Puig Women’s America’s Cup.

Aurora Borealis may still be visible in parts of the U.S. over the next few years.

Venus Williams and eight other athletes receive their very own Barbie dolls.