Virgil Abloh, who died last November at 41 of a rare form of cancer, was known as a sculptor, a graphic artist, a furniture maker, a fashion designer, and a formidable entrepreneur—a polymathic creative whose Ikea doormats became almost as famous as the the album covers he designed for Kanye West and the menswear collections he created for Louis Vuitton. But first, Abloh was an architect. Trained in civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin and in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he studied in the Mies van der Rohe–designed Crown Hall, Abloh wove themes of structure, construction, space, and architectural symbolism throughout nearly all of his subsequent work.
The importance of architecture to Abloh is readily apparent within “Figures of Speech”, the sweeping exhibition dedicated to his career on view at the Brooklyn Museum (through January 2023). The show, which debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2019, was redesigned and expanded for its Brooklyn presentation by Abloh, working with curator Antwaun Sargent and designer Mahfuz Sultan, in the years prior to his death.
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