From significant business changes to noteworthy product launches, there’s always something new happening in the world of design. In this biweekly roundup, AD PRO has everything you need to know.
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In the News
Racist caricatures at Milan Design Week
This year’s edition of Milan Design Week unfolded as it normally does, in a rapturous series of showroom visits, Negroni-fueled parties, and eye-opening installations. Yet there was one disturbing appearance that fiercely threw the boisterous event off course. In Campo Base, a group exhibition curated by Federica Sala, architect Massimo Adario presented an array of appalling 1920s glass figurines that reinforce crude racist stereotypes of Black, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Indigenous people.
These offensive, out-of-touch caricatures were first called out publicly by Hello Human publicist Jenny Nguyen, designer Stephen Burks, and Wava Carpenter and Anna Carnick of Anava Projects in a collective Instagram post. “Such ‘decorative motifs’ have a long and shameful history in our field. It was shocking to see this history so casually evoked in a contemporary design project,” they wrote. Adario claims that harm was not his intent, which only cements the realization that the industry desperately needs to engage in widespread dialogue to illuminate why this show was so upsetting for so many and how something like it must never come to light again. [Editor’s note: For a deeper dive on antiracism in the interiors space, we recommend Sydney Gore’s article “Interior Race Theory Is a Creative Way to Decolonize Our Homes.”]
Sotheby’s to present monthlong Freddie Mercury exhibition and auction series
When he wasn’t on stage donning a flamboyant costume, Queen’s Freddie Mercury was likely holed up in Garden Lodge, the Georgian-style brick villa in London’s Kensington neighborhood that he snagged in 1980. For the last three decades, Mercury’s longtime friend Mary Austin presided over the abode, which remained filled with the musician’s thoughtfully curated stash of Victorian paintings, glass objects, and Japanese fabrics. Some 1,500 of those items will now be displayed in Sotheby’s 16,000-square-foot London gallery (August 4 through September 5, what would have been Mercury’s 77th birthday) after highlights from the collection make their way to New York, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong throughout June.
Following the traveling exhibition, the pieces will be auctioned off in six separate sales in September. Along with treasures like Mercury’s red velvet and rhinestone crown and handwritten working lyrics to “We Are the Champions,” there is an assemblage of exuberant decor, including an early-20th-century enamel desk clock set with Fabergé gems, a 1980s Bakelite rotary phone, and an Art Nouveau glass lamp decked out with a tasseled shade designed by Mercury himself.