We were toured through the well-rounded and exuberant exhibition by Elissa Auther, its curator who then carried the official title of the Windgate Research and Collections curator.Īuther not only offered an insightful take on the expansive show – featured in our current “Fascinating Fashions” issue – but shared personal reflections on the lifestyle brand founded by the Stamford-born Neumann (who also had longtime personal and professional ties to Westchester County). WAG’s sneak peek of “Vera Paints a Scarf: The Art and Design of Vera Neumann” at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) included a notable element. But also the beauty and the diversity.” Of course, there are some outliers, chosen for their streamlined aesthetics and longevity: A guitar pick–shaped wooden dining table by Brazilian architect Arthur Casas stands atop a lone cylindrical column, complemented by a run of classic, three-legged Hans Wegner chairs in the living room, a gray velvet Milo Baughman sectional surrounds an extendable, brushed steel coffee table by Italian artisan Gabriella Crespi.The Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan has appointed Elissa Auther as its deputy director of curatorial affairs and William and Mildred Lasdon chief curator. But for me, they both speak of a very specific and empowering view of America, and the challenges of what it means to be American,” Lumpkin says. “People might not think there’s much connection between a George Nakashima Conoid bench and a Henry Taylor portrait. Above a vintage credenza dusted by framed family photos, a wall hanging of glass tiles and black wax by Chicago-based Rashid Johnson hangs as a mirror beside a photograph of Mike Tyson, his face obscured per Baltimore-born Derrick Adams with a wall of metallic silver paint. The New York loft of art patrons Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi is filled with their collection of important artworks by Black artists. Lumpkin likens this experience to the themes captured by the art on the walls. Both craftsmen, originators of what are now considered iconic symbols of American design, were, to varying degrees, othered. Standing over a long walnut seat by designer George Nakashima, Lumpkin is quick to point out that its maker came to his signature style after learning traditional Japanese joinery from a Nisei woodworker while detained in an Idaho internment camp. He compares his own heritage-his Sephardic Jewish mother was from Tangiers, Morocco, while his father was a Black physicist from the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles the two met while studying at Columbia University-to that of Isamu Noguchi, whose paper lanterns dot Lumpkin’s living room, and who was also biracial. Lumpkin is particularly attracted to items with stories through which he can come to a better self-understanding. “It's a gathering of voices.” That discourse extends to the furnishings, too, which the couple scrupulously hand-selects. “Every collection itself is like a conversation,” Lumpkin says. That commitment can be seen, for example, in the couple’s career-long support of Johnson. A trustee at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, while serving on acquisition committees at MoMA and the Whitney, Lumpkin advocates for Black artists at the institutional level as well as the personal. In a vestibule on the opposite wall hangs Tiny Particles (2008) by Rashid Johnson, a shelf-like assemblage of a spray-painted rock, a candlestick, and a book open to a full-bleed spread showing an image of a nebula.
To the right, one side of a short hallway is decorated by a golden, tendril-like, striped-paint pattern, the result of a stencil concocted by artist David Hammons using bits of hair and wire, affixed to paint rollers and applied. Toy kitchens and chess sets appear curated in a children’s playroom alongside an untitled black-and-white paper silhouette collaged by Kara Walker. “The great thing about that is it survived. “There was a time when museums, or galleries, or collectors weren’t interested in African-American artists, and so the art stayed within the community,” he explains. But, Lumpkin points out, that movement began at home.
Throughout the twentieth century, and still to this day, work by Black artists has been largely underrepresented and undersupported by American museums, but thanks to the sustained, combined efforts of Black curators, activists, scholars, and collectors, like Lumpkin, that is slowly starting to change. “It is an image of Black life,” Lumpkin describes, “that's happy and hopeful and celebratory.” Lumpkin and Boccuzzi are dedicated collectors of work by Black American artists, with a primary lens on contemporary pieces from the past 25 years. The painting captures the ideals at the heart of this house, where a resplendent, rotating selection from a nearly 500-piece art collection seems to highlight every surface.
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