DESIGNWIRE

edited by Annie Block

Red Moon, Red Sunset, and Desert Sky, 12-foot-tall sculptures composed of 50,000 strands of fringe sourced from Crazy Crow Trading Post, a supplier of Native American arts and craft materials, appear in “Jeffrey Gibson: Infinite Indigenous Queer Love,” at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, through March 12, 2022.

fringe benefits

Jeffrey Gibson is master of myriad mediums. Painting, sculpture, Southeastern river cane basket weaving, Algonquian birch bark biting, porcupine quillwork. The variety reflects and draws from his diverse background: He’s of Choctaw-Cherokee descent and gay. This mélange comes together beautifully in “Jeffrey Gibson: Infinite Indigenous Queer Love,” at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Among the approximately 20 works in the show—an assortment of collages, large-scale mixed media, and performance videos, plus a 21-foot-tall ziggurat installed outdoors—are a trio of vibrant hanging sculptures. The tall, 6-foot-square columns are composed of tens of thousands of lengths of the same fringe often used in Indigenous dance regalia, in a rainbow of radiant colors derived from the palette of sunsets and desert skies. The result is a merging of hard-edge shapes and soft, craft-based materiality. “These forms,” Gibson says, “look toward the future with hopes of establishing a different conversation regarding what indigeneity could look like.”

design wire

buzz worthy

Opposites attract.They also drive the core aesthetic of Studio Bipolar, a fledgling firm founded by architects and spouses Sanjana Mathur and Ujjwal Sagar, ages 29 and 30, respectively. Their projects strive to meld classic with contemporary, rough with smooth, luxe with industrial. “A well-balanced space is achieved by combining opposing elements together,” they say. In the case of B-Hive 11, a millennial-minded coworking office in New Delhi, they’ve blended function and fun, uniform and abstract, desks and cats. Orderly rows of workstations are partitioned by vivid plants, their greenery echoed in the faux grass squares fitted into the dropped ceiling grid. Two meeting rooms offers privacy amid pops of pastels. A break-out area furnished with funky ottomans and neon signage declaringApna time aa gaya, orIt’s my time to shine, invite impromptu chats as well as Instagram-worthy selfies. And graphic surface treatments abound. Abstracted faces by a local artist enliven a wall near the pantry; in the women’s restroom, a photomural kitten is bedecked in 3-D red spectacles that double as mirrors.

Clockwise from bottom: New Delhi coworking space B-Hive 11 by Studio Bipolar offers 45 hot-desks and Featherlite chairs amid 4,500 square feet. Flea market–found ottomans in a break-out area. A tintedglass pendant fixture from White Lighting Solutions and Danish Prakash’s mural. A restroom’s painted wood-framed mirrors, photomural, Kerovit sinks, Jaquar fittings, and marble counter.