After establishing itself as a mainstay of the Los Angeles design scene, Alex Tieghi-Walker’s Tiwa Select gallery recently—and at long last—has opened a permanent location in New York City. Fittingly for its new home in a 1915 electrical parts factory in TriBeCa, its first show brings some serious voltage.
Glass artist Dana Arbib shows Vetro Orta, a new collection of lighting and vessels that pay tribute to gourds, cabbages, and other vegetal lifeforms in bold tones of Murano glass. The 17 objects show off Arbib’s ongoing work with Venetian glass artisans, sparked by a discovery that her Libyan uncle owned a furnace there—coincidentally, around the same time the Manhattan electrical parts factory was in action. To further ground Arbib’s work, Tieghi-Walker has partnered with Long Island City’s Somerset House, planting some 200 years of design classics (pieces by Alvar Aalto, Tucker Robbins, even a Biedermeier daybed) around the fifth-floor gallery’s electric 2,200 square feet.
