Alex Tieghi-Walker, the founder of the cult design gallery and platform Tiwa Select, is particularly fond of spaces that feel—in his words—“totally mad.” Just take his current base in Manhattan. Situated in the attic of the rambling 19th-century National Arts Club overlooking Gramercy Park, it’s reached via a rabbit warren of staircases and consists of a single room painted chartreuse yellow. “It’s a very strange, eccentric, magical building, and my space in it is like a tiny little shoebox,” he says, cheerily. “But that’s the kind of environment I like.”
As a result, Tieghi-Walker’s first exhibition in London, opening today, marks something of a gear shift for the curator and gallerist. Titled “The North American Pavilion,” the venue is the grand townhouse of No. 9 Cork Street, operated by the art world behemoth Frieze as a hub for international galleries and overseen by director Selvi May Akyildiz—smack bang in the heart of Mayfair’s gallery district, and mere steps away from the British capital’s luxury flagships.
“My gallery in L.A. was in an old adult theater and you had to go through a little Mexican dress shop to get to it,” says Tieghi-Walker. “In New York, I’m like the mad old man in the attic. So I kind of love that we’re all showing in Mayfair, around the corner from the Royal Academy. It feels like we’ve infiltrated something. I think it was a real leap of faith for Frieze to do this with us, and I’m excited to see what comes out of it.”
The mandate of the exhibition is somehow both ambitious and humble. While Tieghi-Walker conceived it as a kind of survey of the current state of American design (no small task), with the aim of introducing a new generation of galleries and makers to a British audience, he deliberately brought together a community of design obsessives who are preoccupied with the granular details of the objects they make and sell, with an emphasis on imperfections and the handmade. “I just thought, there are so many cool galleries I admire that are young, that have never showed abroad, that have this really unique perspective,” he says. “Why not bring them all together?”
Each of the eight participating galleries (one of which is Tieghi-Walker’s own Tiwa Select) was carefully chosen for its unique take on North American design today, bringing with them a broad spectrum of perspectives and practices. There is the L.A.-based Noon Projects, whose foregrounding of queer makers and social issues is brought to vivid life through geometric steel and glass candle sconces by Ben Borden, their surfaces decorated with globular, psychedelic patterns created by a chemical reaction of algae and crystallized salt, or in a series of charming, knobbly ceramic mugs featuring weird and wonderful human forms that whisper of the pre-historic, made by artist William Moss.
In another space, Of the Cloth—a nomadic store and curatorial project based between New York and Atlanta—presents a series of striking metallic-glazed black clay vases by Kristen Stain, loosely inspired by historic traditions of West African sculpture, along with a handful of 3-D printed bronzes by Minne Atairu, whose slinky, rippling forms took their cues from the reverence for the humble mudfish in the Kingdom of Benin.
Meanwhile, the star piece within the space occupied by the Montréal-based gallery Bruises is a dramatic cast-iron bathtub, painted by artist Trevor Bourke with a bucolic scene of a shepherdess walking her lambs by a river. “It’s been really interesting seeing how all the different galleries have responded to this idea of showing off North American curation, and hanging out in the blurrier areas between disciplines,” says Tieghi-Walker.
For Tiwa Select as a project, this irreverent approach to the boundaries between disciplines has always been part of the plan. After Tieghi-Walker spent many years working in both the fine art world and independent media, visitors to his redwood barn home in Berkeley, California—whether friends from his hometown of London staying with him for a few nights, or dinner party guests from his new creative community in the Bay Area—remarked on its potential as a gallery space, to show off pieces by Tieghi-Walker’s rapidly growing network of craftspeople. After the pandemic halted his plans to open a physical space in 2020, he launched Tiwa Select online, spotlighting a mix of folk art, found objects, and new pieces from a thoughtfully curated list of makers, most of whom Tieghi-Walker knew personally.
Interest in the project quickly grew—in part for the more democratic platform it offered designers, with many of the most beautiful objects coming from self-taught makers and artisans from Latin America and Japan who had never had their work featured in America before. “My intention was never really to open a gallery,” Tieghi-Walker says. “I always wanted it to be a bit more nebulous, and to offer a support network to craftspeople, designers, artists, and keeping all of the divisions between them quite blurry.” A series of itinerant, pandemic-friendly shows followed—one, titled “Big Plates,” took place in a forest in upstate New York, while others were staged in the homes of friends. More recently, Tieghi-Walker has primarily been showing in New York City, with an initial space on Mott Street in Nolita that was open for a few months towards the end of last year, and now, his room at the top of the National Arts Club.
The idea of referring to the exhibition as a “pavilion” came about, in part, as a humorous nod to the Venice Biennale, where dozens of countries from around the world showcase work by their leading artists in custom-built pavilions within the city’s Giardini; the humor here coming from the fact that where these countries are likely to send their doyens and grand dames to Venice, the galleries here are uniformly less than five years old. “Obviously this is a tiny show—it’s not exactly the World Fair—but I do love the idea of a show where every country puts its best foot forward,” he adds. “It’s a very interesting exhibition model.”
Some have also identified Tiwa Select as part of a new wave of American design galleries, whose indifferent approach to the traditional hierarchies of fine and applied arts has seen them embrace a more diverse and interdisciplinary vision spanning the worlds of design, craft, fashion, interiors, and more. (Other gallerists cited in a New York Times article from last year include “The North American Pavilion” exhibitors Emma Scully and Jacqueline Sullivan.) “I don’t want to say it’s a movement, necessarily, but I definitely think a lot of galleries are moving in that direction,” says Tieghi-Walker.
More important, however, is the notion that the exhibitors should feel like a community. “I don’t want us to be rivals in this situation, I want us to feel like a family,” says Tieghi-Walker, likening the camaraderie between the participating gallerists, all of whom have traveled to London for the opening, to that of a school trip. (Tieghi-Walker is planning group outings to, among other places, Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge while they’re here.) Most of the gallerists are either friends or followers of each other’s work, with Tieghi-Walker’s intending for the exhibition to feel like a “cooperative or collective” could be behind it. “It doesn’t feel like one single show, but then it doesn’t feel like all of these entirely separate ideologies either,” he says. “There’s this real feeling of—oh, it all fits together. It’s almost like lots of little worlds in one universe.”
It’s a universe that may feel unfamiliar to many of the blue-chip galleries that line the surrounding streets of their townhouse takeover, but hopefully, one that will pique their curiosity—and possibly even nudge them into a more boundary-breaking understanding of where the worlds of art and design can intersect, too. “It’s nice being able to show in London, which is such a special place to me: I left here when I was 26, and I was sort of too young to really appreciate it,” Tieghi-Walker says, before breaking into a laugh: “But watch out! The Americans are in town.”
