Virgil Abloh. "Figures of Speech".

The first museum exhibition

Virgil Abloh: "Figures of Speech" ran at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago from 10 June to 29 September 2019, in the Griffin Galleries of Contemporary Art on the fourth floor. The MCA presented it as the first museum exhibition devoted to Abloh's work.

It was curated by Michael Darling, the MCA's chief curator, with Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol. The space was designed by Samir Bantal, director of AMO, the research studio of Rem Koolhaas's architecture office OMA.

Abloh was born in 1980. He studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He made album covers and concert designs with Kanye West. In 2013 he founded Off-White in Milan. In 2018 he became men's artistic director at Louis Vuitton.

The show therefore opened in the city where he trained. The MCA describes a practice that cuts across media, linking visual artists, musicians, graphic designers, fashion designers and architects.

Street objects in the gallery

The exhibition moved through music, fashion, architecture and design: signature clothing collections, films of runway shows, furniture, graphic design, and projects made with contemporary artists.

In 2021 it travelled to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, from 3 July to 26 September. Installation views there show specific things: an all black gas station sign set at a tilt, shelves of sneakers, a Louis Vuitton bag bound to a plinth with neon orange chain, a giant CD in its case, a pale blue ladder on a black plinth, along with furniture and rugs.

These objects come from ordinary life: the gas station, the shoe shop, the record, the ladder. Abloh does not turn them into something else. He enlarges them, tilts them, chains them, raises them on a plinth. One small operation, and the object begins to be read as an idea.

The title says it most clearly. Figures of speech are the figurative turns of language. Quotation marks, a familiar device of Abloh's, do something similar: they lift a word or an object out of its usual flow and say, look at this again.

Museum and shop

On the MCA's fourth floor, beside the exhibition, stood a pop up shop called Church & State, arranged by Abloh's team. It sold Off-White pieces, including a look back at the label and exclusive collections inspired by the show.

Placing a shop next to the galleries was deliberate. The line between an object to look at and an object to buy was blurred. For Abloh this was not a contradiction to resolve but the very material of his work.

The public programme was just as wide: talks on style, streetwear, sustainability, making design accessible, and even scent. There was a youth design showcase. The museum opened its doors to people who seldom thought they belonged there.

Abloh died at the end of 2021, two months after the show closed in Boston. Looking back, Figures of Speech reads less like a summary than a notebook left open. It shows someone at work, still asking, still putting things in quotation marks to see what they might say.