“I was thinking about my childhood bedroom,” says Jacqueline Sullivan, explaining the concept behind the new exhibition “Play!” at her Tribeca gallery, which has intrigued aesthetes of all sorts with its thoughtful curation of antiques, contemporary art, and design objects since its 2022 opening.
“Everything felt intense and serious in the design world,” she continues, “and I thought it would be fun to think about a time where there was a really intimate, private space that was free from self-consciousness, where it wasn’t going to be, like, a home tour—it was just whatever you loved, like glow-in-the-dark stars and Titanic posters.”
She passed the prompt along to a handful of contemporary artists, including Joana Avillez, Doug McCollough, and Matt Paweski, and kept that same unbridled enthusiasm in mind while selecting the historical objects she’d put in the show.
The end result is a delightfully eclectic mix of old-meets-new, where a circa 1920 embroidery-framed mirror from the Cotswolds reflects fluted aluminum vessels by Paweski, which sit atop stacked trompe l’oeil tables from the late 20th century, which you can see while looking through one of three face-in-hole boards designed by Avillez (whose shapes are inspired by other pieces in the show). It’s like a vintage Ringling Brothers poster come to exquisite life.
“I feel like it’s especially nice now to have a reprieve from bleakness and heaviness and be in a space that’s really about joy,” Sullivan says. And indeed, with another icy cold weekend upon us in New York, a jaunt to a show literally called “Play!” offers a respite from winter’s bite. (The climb up to the gallery’s perch on the building’s fourth floor is also sure to warm you.)
On the contemporary artist side, the duo Libby Rosen contributed seven luminous textile works made of marbled quilted fabric. Elliot Camarra, originally from Cape Cod, created works from paper, metal, glass, and wood that evoke the sea. McCollough’s take on a Queen Anne’s cabinet floats magically in a corner (open the doors for a surprise).
Other vintage highlights include a 1989 chaise lounge with wrought iron arms in the shape of a horse, a pair of circus-coded Murano glass pendant lights, a classic-cool 1973 coat rack from Ettore Sottsass (“he had to be in the show,” says Sullivan), and an assortment of fruit-shaped silver boxes used for storing betel nut, a stimulant popular in Southeast Asia. A show-stopper of a lamp, made in 1977 by the late Garry Knox Bennett, a mentor of McCollough’s, lights up by touching its tail.
Sullivan, raised in Massachusetts and now based in New York, started her gallery as a hybrid space straddling the worlds of decorative arts and fine art, of things made yesterday and over a century ago. “We don’t really differentiate…it’s just all living, breathing things in a room,” she says. But it took time for people to grasp the concept. “They really didn’t understand where to put us,” she says. “There was no real blueprint, which is fun but also a little bit challenging, doing something that doesn t necessarily fit within the contemporary art space or an antique showroom.”
But once it opened, the gallery quickly drew in fans—the design-focused Substack “For Scale” called the gallery “incomparable” for its approach. Past shows include “A Shared Scaffolding,” which explored frameworks of support (think Arts and Crafts benches and chain-link candle holders), and “The Semiotics of Dressing,” which had an offshoot at the Marni store in Miami last winter.
One of the last objects I saw before I left “Play!” was an old wooden toy from France, from sometime in the 20th century, which has a wheel of race horses that spins down its base when the whole thing is flipped over, like a slowly sinking merry-go-round. It was mesmerizing, this totally analog toy, with its tiny figurines going round and round as they descend. For once, I thought, a downward spiral to be charmed by.
“Play!” is on view at Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery at 52 Walker Street, Fourth Floor, in New York City through March 21.