EVERYTHING VIRGIL ABLOH DID—from his work designing for Off-White and as artistic director for menswear at Louis Vuitton to his forays into art, music, film, and design to his collaborations with brands like Nike and Ikea—seemed irrepressibly democratic and forward-moving. It’s a concept central to the new Brooklyn Museum edition of the touring exhibition “Virgil Abloh: ‘Figures of Speech,’” which opens on July 1.
“‘Figures of Speech,’” which debuted in Chicago in 2019 before traveling to Atlanta, Boston, and Doha, was originally conceived as a midcareer retrospective of Abloh’s boundary-breaking oeuvre as an artist, designer, and creative polymath. But following his untimely death from a rare form of cancer last November at the age of just 41, it now functions as a celebration of the work of a prolific creator…
