The Centre Pompidou Plans an Outpost in Jersey City, and Other News

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The Centre Pompidou plans its next global outpost in an unlikely location: Jersey City.  

The Centre Pompidou in Paris has lately been extending its global reach with outposts in far-flung locations such as Brussels, Shanghai, and Málaga, Spain. Its next destination is none other than Jersey City, specifically an unassuming four-story brick building at 25 Journal Square that was originally used as a trolley compound and will soon be revamped by OMA and Jason Long. Called “Centre Pompidou x Jersey City,” the institution’s first North American branch will operate semi-independently but still have access to 120,000 works and its network of experts and curators. “Our idea is to be confronted with what’s very different,” Serge Lasvignes, Pompidou’s president, told the New York Times. “For us, it’s a way to learn—to learn new circumstances, a new way of presenting art, a new way of presenting exhibitions.” The outpost is slated to open in early 2024, shortly after its Paris campus closes for four years to undergo top-to-bottom renovations.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation names this year’s most endangered places.

Every year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation names 11 of the country’s most endangered historic places to illuminate neglected corners of American history and galvanize preservation work before crucial landmarks are lost forever. (Special emphasis is placed on African American and Native American history.) This year’s list, which can be viewed here, includes a Utah trading post for Navajo communities and the Alabama farms where civil rights marchers once camped. “Finding places that will tell the full history of our country is a priority in all of our work,” says Katherine Malone France, the Trust’s chief preservation officer, who helped narrow 120 nominations from 40 states and Puerto Rico down to 11 sites.

Helmut Lang and Hank Willis Thomas drop a collection inspired by his lenticular works.

Helmut Lang has teamed up with Hank Willis Thomas to launch a limited-edition collection of hoodies, T-shirts, and dresses called “It’s All About You/It’s Not About You.” Each of the collection’s ten pieces are produced with lenticular printing and garment techniques—printing on sheer fabric and a reverse print on the garment’s interior—so a different message is revealed depending where the viewer stands. “Helmut Lang developed a technique so that what a person sees changes based on their physical relationship to a person wearing the shirt,” Thomas told WWD. “It’s about calling the viewer to think about how their position affects what they see.”

Lévy Gorvy is preparing a four-city exhibition of new works by Mickalene Thomas in the fall.

A landmark exhibition of new interconnected works by Mickalene Thomas will unfold this fall across Lévy Gorvy’s four global outposts in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong. The exhibition will feature paintings, installations, and video works that expand Thomas’s decades-long exploration of the Black female body as a realm of agency, eroticism, power, and inspiration. “In Mickalene’s art, we see both strength and vulnerability, eloquence and enigma, a temporal painterly sensibility combined with conceptual rigor,” Dominique Lévy says of the show, called “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” which riffs on and conflates two opuses that have long influenced Thomas: The Pleasure Principle, a song off Janet Jackson’s 1986 album Control, and Sigmund Freud’s landmark 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principles. The first installment opens on September 9 in New York.

MoMA’s next major exhibition will spotlight Chinese architects focused on sustainability.

The Museum of Modern Art’s next major exhibition will spotlight contemporary Chinese architecture designed by young firms focused on environmental concerns and social sustainability. Called “Reuse, Renew, Recycle: Recent Architecture from China,” the show will showcase eight projects such as a sugar mill turned mountainous hotel and an outdoor bamboo theater that reflect the work of a younger generation of independent practices “invested in relatively small-scale interventions that seek to meaningfully engage with the preexisting built environment and established social structures.” Most of these projects are located outside China’s vast mega-cities, which experienced rapid urbanization at the hands of mostly Western firms. The exhibition will open on September 16.

Efforts are underway to preserve a Keith Haring mural facing demolition in Barcelona.

Keith Haring visited Barcelona in 1989 and ended up painting numerous murals across the city, including one inside the DJ cabin at the erstwhile Ars Studio club. The mural survived after the club closed in 1992 and was converted into a billiards hall, but now faces an uncertain future as the owners are seeking to build an elderly care facility on the site. According to Gabriel Carral, who runs the billiards hall, the mural is valued around $97,000 and the Keith Haring Foundation is willing to pay for its costly removal, but he hasn’t decided whether to sell it or donate it to the foundation. 

Today’s attractive distractions:

Kehinde Wiley’s stained glass panels of Black figures light up a U.K. cathedral. 

The American Museum of Natural History refreshes its cave-like Hall of Gems.

James Bartolacci’s paintings recall pre-pandemic nightlife and queer spaces.

Pop artist and activist Corita Kent’s famed Hollywood studio gets landmarked.