What’s Happening: A London-based researcher and the winner of this year’s Wheelwright Prize, Loewenson is exploring social and spatial relations in contemporary Africa by overhauling how we approach them.

The Download: When Thandi Loewenson was earning her PhD in architecture at The Bartlett at University College London, she co-founded Break//Line, a collective that seeks to challenge discrimination and “inescapable capitalism” in the study of architecture. It laid the groundwork for the Harare-born scholar’s current undertaking, Black Papers, an ambitious research project that explores social and spatial relations in contemporary Africa by untangling how we approach them. While land is often at the center of African liberation movements—property, agriculture, and mining, to name a few—Loewenson zooms out and contemplates how space below and above ground contributes to these forces. One key focus involves rare metals buried below the Earth’s surface, harvested by miners and used in ways that abet digital dispossession.

Loewenson was recently named the winner of this year’s Wheelwright Prize. The $100,000 grant awarded by the Harvard Graduate School of Design supports a promising early-career architect pursuing travel-based research that may leave a wide-ranging impact on the field. Black Papers fits that bill. With the prize’s funds, Loewenson plans to concentrate her work in seven African countries—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe—to study satellite imagery that casts light on exploitative mining labor. Ultimately, she hopes to shape policy discourse and public perceptions through drawings, moving images, performances, and critical creative writing designed to reach the masses on video, radio, and even social media platforms like WhatsApp.

In Their Own Words: “This research presents a radical shift,” Loewenson said, “developing a new epistemic framework and a series of open-access, creatively reimagined policy proposals in which earth and air are not distinct, but rather concomitant terrains through which racialization and exploitation are forged on the continent, and through which they will be fought.”

Surface Says: Previous winners of the Wheelwright Prize have circled the globe to unpack a wide range of social, cultural, ecological, and technological issues, but Loewenson might be the first to take
to the skies.

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At Il Totano, a new West Village hotspot in the making, interior designer Sasha Bikoff seems to have taken a page out of the vibrant menu. From the spicy passion fruit colatura at play in the dry-aged Kona kampachi to the grilled royal red shrimp’s Sicilian lemon, the famously expressive designer has created a bridge between the color-rich courses and the restaurant’s deliciously flamboyant décor.

A palette of coastal blues nod to summertime on the Amalfi coast, while striations of “​terracotta, tangerine, and mustard” serve as an homage to fashion label Marni’s knack for expert color-blocking. Nautilus sconces and chrome mushroom lamps in turn evoke a beach club discothèque, rounding out the restaurant’s exultant, more-is-more vibe.

Like many of us, the year 2020 saddled Kara Walker—the celebrated American artist who examines power dynamics and racial exploitation—with quarantine-induced inertia and contemplations of death and dying. Yet it also provided well-deserved stasis after having completed a series of major commissions, the most recent at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. After being moved by the New-York Historical Society’s 2022 show about dolls made by enslaved women, she revisited her own childhood doll and crystallized the concept for her latest feat, “Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine),” which was unveiled this week in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s street-level gallery.

“Fortuna” sees Walker jettison her signature cut-paper silhouettes and monumental sculptures to experiment with mechanized robots whose spasmodic movements (think Herbie Hancock’s video “Rockit”), somber Victorian gowns, and hand-modeled clay faces embody the collective trauma wrought by an unpredictable decade. To bring them to life, Walker “went down a little sci-fi rabbit hole” that involved revisiting Octavia E. Butler’s post-apocalyptic opus Parable of the Sower (1993), studying Bunraku puppetry, and reading essays by Donna Harraway and Jessica Riskin about cyborgs and automatons. Set in a field of obsidian rocks, the figures dispense aphorisms about liberation and Afro-pessimism that Walker tried to enlist ChatGPT to write, but she spearheaded when she realized that machines lack that human touch.

In June, the Female Design Council inaugurated BAS Stone’s new Long Island City stoneyard with a co-hosted dinner honoring women designers. Against a backdrop of pink quartz, Italian marble, limestone, guests from New York City’s close-knit design community took in the space and mingled over drinks. A tablescape and dinner architected by culinary talent Romilly Newman evoked the stoneyard and brought everyone together for a festive rest of the night.

When was it? June 18

Where was it? BAS Stoneyard, Long Island City

Who was there? Lora Appleton, Angharad Coates, Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Delia Kenza, Sara Zewde, Cheryl Riley, Maayan Zilberman, Laura Young, Estelle Bailey-Babenzien, and Emilia Vincent.

The Shah Garg Collection features works by 80 women artists from the past eight decades, including Rina Banerjee, Cecily Brown, Judy Chicago, Charline von Heyl, Jacqueline Humphries, Joan Semmel, and more. Curated by Cecilia Alemani, “Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection” marks the first public viewing of a groundbreaking body of work by women collected by Komal Shah and her husband Gaurav Garg.

Surface Says: The debut exhibition of the groundbreaking collection establishes invaluable takeaways, like historical impact and significant breakthroughs across the careers of the collection’s intergenerational roster of women artists.

Centre Pompidou unveils a PoMo skate park ahead of the Paris Olympics.

Etsy’s sudden sex toy ban sparks an outpouring of support for indie makers.

Adapt or die? Tennis clubs respond to the rise in pickleball and padel enthusiasts.

Two massive asteroids passed scarily close to Earth over the weekend.