At the memorial, I sat a few rows behind his family, next to the artists Arthur Jafa and Theaster Gates. It was Monday, the sixth of December, at noon, and we were gathered in the two-story glass atrium of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, to pay our respects to the artist Virgil Abloh, who had, a week earlier, died of a rare heart cancer at the age of 41. Inside, it was like a somber Met Gala; the assembled crowd included Rihanna, Frank Ocean, Drake, models Karlie Kloss and Bella Hadid, and young designers Kerby-Jean Raymond and Rhuigi Villaseñor. We sat in white chairs in a large light-filled, modernist room that looked out on the city's skyline. Outside it was cloudy and cold, which mirrored the mood in the room.
The service began with a sermon by Pastor Rich Wilkerson Jr., who had officiated Kim and Kanye's wedding and first met V, as he was known to those who worked closely with him, during the years he served as Kanye's creative director. In the wake of V's diagnosis, in 2019, Rich had become a kind of spiritual adviser, helping him reckon with the work he would leave undone, and here he functioned as a master of ceremonies, inviting V's wife, Shannon Abloh, to eulogize him. She wore a black silk robe that V had designed, with the word woman emblazoned across the back, and was followed at the podium by some of V's closest collaborators—Don C, the streetwear designer; Benji B, the British DJ and producer; Mahfuz Sultan, the architect and writer; Tyler, the Creator, the rapper. They recalled the sacrifices V made for his art, the endless flights and far-flung DJ sets, the constant WhatsApp messaging, the Instagram account he used as an open studio where he shared “cheat codes” to beat the game that is our culture. They were awed by the disparate assemblage of people he gathered into a constellation that lit up a new aesthetic universe. They mourned the dashed potential of the years lost.
And I mourned V too. For me, this service represented a coda—the epilogue to my two-year journey to package the work of this most unorthodox genius into a museum exhibition. I had tried to get to the heart of what drove V as a creator, to understand his impulses and concerns, to catalog his prolific output. I had wrestled with the seemingly impossible task of curating one of the most polymathic artists of our time. And yet, as I listened to his friends and collaborators and protégés, I realized that the truest gesture he made was to inspire acts of creation from nearly everyone he, and his objects, came in contact with. The depth of that desire—to usher us into a new age of creativity—wasn't completely clear to me until that very moment. We had known V was working hard to get his ideas into the world. But his greatest ideas were the ones he had cultivated in the procession of artists taking the lectern—the youth who had seen what he made and decided that they, too, could create art of their own.
I first met V on a call arranged by the Brooklyn Museum's director, Anne Pasternak, in the fall of 2019. She told me that she wanted to bring Virgil's “explosive creativity” to the museum. At the time, he had a traveling exhibition, “Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech,” and she told me that V wanted me to guest-curate the show's final iteration. “He was doing something where there was a gap,” Pasternak recently told me. “He was putting a spotlight on a gap, kicking the gates open, to make it possible for other young Black creatives to see themselves in these positions.” She added, “I think that there is a wave of creative excellence that's been coming at us, that maybe would not have existed had Virgil not torn down those gates.”
At that point, V's show had opened in Chicago and would go on to Atlanta, Boston, and Doha before reaching Brooklyn. But he told me, on our first call, that he wanted to say something new in New York. With a deep fondness, he recalled his time in the city, just over a decade ago, as a member of the streetwear fashion and art collective #BEEN #TRILL; he reminisced about friendships with young downtown creatives like Venus X, the DJ and founder of the underground party GHE20G0TH1K, and Shayne Oliver, the cofounder and design director of Hood by Air. Together V and Shayne had shared notes on culture, trying to make noise as Black designers on the outside of the fashion and art worlds looking in. To memorialize that time, they created In Conversation With Shayne (2019), an installation consisting of T-shirts folded inside cardboard boxes labeled “virgil abloh official files.” A comment on their upstart spirit and their staying power, the work also showed, as Shayne has said, that they “had ideas to bring to fashion, but not specifically for fashion.”
After that initial meeting, V's longtime chief of staff, Athiththan Selvendran, known as Athi, created a WhatsApp group chat so that we could all communicate in real time. Also in the chat was Sultan, who had studied architecture at Harvard and would help us conceptualize the show. From the beginning the ideas flew. What struck me immediately is that V was as focused on other artists' work as he was on his own. We were curating a man who was constantly curating the culture around him, sampling ideas, making them his, ceding space to those who inspired him. There was, for instance, the idea to incorporate into the show works of his choosing from the museum's collection of 1.5 million objects—a gesture that alluded to installation artist and sculptor Fred Wilson's “Mining the Museum,” a seminal 1992 show in which the artist used the Maryland Historical Society's collection to expose the beauty, contradictions, and erasures of art institutions. Other ideas were more radical. One day, V dropped into the chat a sketch of large-scale neon signs that spelled out, in his loopy handwriting, words like “IRAK,” a reference to the legendary late-'90s downtown New York graffiti crew. V suggested we install them across the Beaux-Arts façade of the museum to make a statement: This wasn't going to be an ordinary exhibition.
One early idea I had was to create an exhibition where everything was for sale—a show where you could buy the chairs, paintings, sneakers, jewelry, speakers, sculptures, bags, and everything else off the walls and pedestals as a critique of art world consumption and consumer culture. As the readymade objects were bought, messages, written in V's signature quotation style, would reveal themselves in the emptied-out galleries of the museum's Great Hall. After some research, though, we abandoned the plan. Takashi Murakami, the acclaimed Japanese Pop artist who collaborated with V most recently on a trio of shows at Gagosian Gallery, had explored a similar premise with former Louis Vuitton creative director Marc Jacobs at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008. V had no problem sampling ideas, but this approach had to be fresh.
Over time, the chat became a stream of reference images for the exhibition design, a place for V to share old and new work, and a space to think together about the relationships between, say, billboard advertisement and painting, garments and architecture. In January 2020, I visited V in his large and messy Louis Vuitton atelier in Paris, a sprawling, mazelike laboratory that was like an entryway to the artist's brain. There was DJ equipment for impromptu office sets, bags and racks of his LV clothing, a large mirror framed with the red Time magazine logo. In between fittings for his fashion presentations, V shared ideas for our show. On an orange table was a foam model of the Brooklyn Museum's Great Hall and, displayed inside, the objects he wanted to present—shoes from his Nike collaborations, his first ad campaign for LV, mannequins wearing his designs, sculptures he'd built, chairs he'd designed, silkscreens from Pyrex Vision, his first fashion label. It was a survey representing every chapter of his career as a maker.
This was right before the pandemic and the racial protests, which would make us rethink the show. By July of that year, we realized it needed to be more responsive, have a more direct social dimension. We started thinking about the idea of a social sculpture, a contemporary take on what V called “a Trojan horse.” It would be a Black space, populated with V's work, designed with the principles of what the artist David Hammons once termed “negritude architecture,” which he defined as “the way Black people make things, houses or magazine stands in Harlem, for instance. Just the way we use carpentry. Nothing fits, but everything works. The door closes, it keeps things from coming through. But it doesn't have that neatness about it, the way white people put things together; everything is a thirty-second of an inch off.”
The idea became concrete in October 2020, when V dropped into the chat a rendering of a one-story black house with exaggerated proportions that lightly took direction from the Herzog & de Meuron–designed furniture museum Vitra Schaudepot, in Weil am Rhein, Germany. The building would occupy the center space of the exhibition hall. As visitors moved around it, they would encounter a black tactical ladder—a metaphor for the way V was storming the museum, with metal steps etched with the names of various “figures of speech,” from the Pan-Africanist musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti to the rapper Ghostface Killah. One side of the house would be lined with pedestals displaying, say, a shoe or a bag or a kite V had designed, as a way to elevate objects of culture (whether low or mass or luxury) into the realm of sculpture, which is to say art. At the entrance would be a black-and-white sign that said “colored people only.” The interior would have dark wood flooring, conveying a note of intimacy and history. It was a living sculpture that would double as a house museum, a nod to Black interiority and a reminder that before museums let Black folks into them, we used our living rooms as places to show off our art and our histories. Above all, the space would be autonomous; V and his collaborators would set the rules for what was displayed and why.
It was a way for V to play with the dynamics of power and history that had largely kept Black art off the white walls of art institutions. It was also a way to show that V did everything along what Hans Ulrich Obrist, the art historian and artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, in London, calls a “DIY path.” Obrist, who collaborated with V on a series of talks that considered everything from the modern city to bookmaking, tells me that V's “post-medium condition” is the result of “this idea of DIY, that the artist or designer could do something as a way to provide instructions so then anyone could just do it.” V “had a very concrete connection to utopia,” Obrist explains. “What he meant by utopia is ‘something is missing,’ as he would say. I always had the feeling that he was also interested in producing and making things happen that were missing.” What was missing to V was real Black space—a place to dream, ideate, and create—and the structure he proposed for the Brooklyn Museum was a way to make it real.
As our dialogue went on, it became clear that we were particularly interested in, as V put it in one Zoom call, “what three Black kids”—V, Sultan, and myself—could get away with in a museum. That for him was “our North Star.” The “dope” part of planning the exhibition was the rare opportunity for a Black artist, architect, and curator to make their concerns known in the halls of one of America's most distinguished museums. When V was not into an idea, as Benji B recalled at his memorial, he would politely pause, turn his head sideways, scratch it, and say, in his professorial drawl, “Yeaaaaah.” I told him I wanted more fashion in the show, because I thought the audience would appreciate it. Yeaaaaah. This is not to say he wasn't incredibly open in our conversations. “I'm siked on this new sculpture I just made—and just shot images of it, will toss it in here in case it sparks any ideas,” he wrote in the chat, in December 2019, referencing a monogrammed LV Coffret Trésor treasure case he had refashioned into an old-school “boombox,” mounted with horns, feathers, and bike mirrors—a work that would later appear in the Louis Vuitton Men's fall-winter 2022 show at Paris Fashion Week. He didn't want the show to privilege one form of making over another. It was not to be a fashion show masquerading as an art exhibition.
The initial installment of the show, V's first at a museum, had been curated by Michael Darling and mounted, in 2019, at the MCA Chicago before traveling to the High Museum in Atlanta, the ICA Boston, and Doha's Fire Station. As Darling wrote, it focused on how V's “approach to conceptual art relies on the most impactful tools contemporary culture has to offer—music, fashion, social media, celebrity—filling his work with borrowings, rebrandings, claimings, critiques, and deconstructions that have all the hallmarks of Duchampian irony.” Darling presented objects like V's 2006 grad school thesis, which imagined a Chicago skyscraper bending, like a tree in the wind, toward Lake Michigan; the gold plate he made to press Jay-Z and Kanye's Watch the Throne; the black “Queen” tennis skirt with a tutu-like silhouette he designed for Serena Williams; and The Reality (2016), an Off-White showroom rug that quoted a critical review of a collection from his first label, Pyrex Vision. “Pyrex simply bought a bunch of Rugby flannels, slapped ‘Pyrex 23’ on the back, and resold them for an astonishing markup of about 700%,” the text read. He had named Pyrex for the glassware used to cook crack cocaine, and The Reality subtly suggested the convergence of two buyers: drug addicts and hypebeasts in need of a fashion fix. It was a provocative point about race and class and consumerism. Here he was, a Black man pushing a highly desirable product, not unlike the dope boys he saw on the streets of Chicago—only he wasn't being arrested but celebrated.
Using Darling's framing, I was intent that our Brooklyn show reveal the creative process of a Black artist who had taken the seemingly disconnected cultural codes of hip-hop, high fashion, design, architecture, and art, and, using a can of spray paint, a Sharpie, and Helvetica Neue Bold, scrambled them into a unique visual language. You go to war with the army you got. By writing on mundane objects like office supplies, zip ties, flags, kites, belts, handbags (which he called sculpture), and Nike Air Force 1's (which he called icons), he lifted them into the realm of metaphor, shot through with questions about identity, labor, and value. These artistically elevated everyday objects were a nod to art history—Duchamp, Warhol, Hammons—as well as an homage to hip-hop-inflected graffiti writers like Futura, Zephyr, and Jim Joe, who wrote wherever they saw fit. But V was also interested in the essence of objects, and would often strip traditional luxury items down to their utilitarian purposes (“FOR WALKING” he wrote on a pair of Off-White black leather boots). It was all a way to make us reconsider contemporary culture. For me, that ethos was best encapsulated by one piece in particular. PSA (2019) is a black nylon flag with two white words in quotes that now read like an urgent warning: “QUESTION EVERYTHING.”
V was a master of signs and symbols, and spent his career upending long-settled cultural hierarchies with playful irony. He also raised questions about what art even was: He reminded us, for instance, that to some an expensive bag is a sculpture, equal in weight and stature. Very few Black men have exercised that level of power in our culture. To me that was worth investigating. But the real reason I decided to curate the exhibition was because of his central creative subject: Black boyhood. I had come of age in Chicago, in the same neighborhood where V would move with his wife to create his work and start a family. And until V, I had never encountered a Black creative person who spoke so openly to the next generation of Black makers. Born the son of Ghanaian immigrants in the suburb of Rockford, Illinois, V always remained motivated by the curiosity and dreams of what he called his “17-year-old self.” As a suburban teenage aesthete, he loved hip-hop, graffiti, low and high design, and skateboarding; everything he created flowed from those obsessions.
When he went off to college, that love of design grew into a fascination with engineering, and then architecture, which he studied at the Mies van der Rohe–designed campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in the early aughts. And then he graduated into a totally different world—Kanye's burgeoning new chapter of hip-hop, where he became a kind of prophet of the power of youth. First as Ye's creative director, then as the founder and designer of two fashion labels, Pyrex Vision and Off-White, and finally as the first Black artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear, he patiently prodded other young artists, activists, architects, rappers, and designers to action. Samuel Ross and Luka Sabbat, Tyler, the Creator, and Heron Preston have all acknowledged that V helped clarify their visions and make them real. He understood, as the old African American adage goes, that you lift as you climb.
One way V did that lifting was by telling young people to simply do what he did: try out every idea that came to their minds, without stressing about whether they'd be successful. In our conversations he was always pushing for what he called “some big shifts.” He once said to me, after sharing a project he was working on, “If kids you come across are special for this mission, send thru and let's all do a project.”
A few years back, V's friend Oana Stanescu, an architect he bonded with working on Ye's Cruel Summer and later collaborated with on the design of several Off-White stores, invited him to speak at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Before V, she tells me, an architect and historian named Kenneth Frampton gave a short talk. “He's five decades almost to the day older than Virgil,” Stanescu says, “and he's the guy who wrote the modern history of architecture, like he's super known.” Frampton's talk, she recalls, was incredibly bleak. “It was dark as fuck,” she says. He told the bright minds of tomorrow, between politics and the environment, you guys are fucked. “I remember asking him, ‘Any opportunities in this?’ And he's like, ‘no.’ And then one hour later, Virgil comes, and he is like, ‘This is a great time to be alive.’ ” The brief, she remembers V telling them, was to reimagine the world they inherited.
One way V reimagined the world was through his rule of three percent, which he considered the exact amount of creative reworking needed to transform an everyday object into a work of art. This controversial dogma led him to sample everything from Caravaggio's The Entombment of Christ to the United Nations logo (until the U.N. asked him to desist). His slight modifications left some critics feeling he wasn't particularly innovative. “I'm inspired by people who bring something that I think has not been seen, that is original,” designer Raf Simons said of Off-White in a 2017 interview with this magazine. Those critiques didn't matter to V, though. You couldn't break that Black man's spirit. V told me that when he asked the industry group Cotton Incorporated to use their famed logo for merch, the company declined because, as he recalled a representative saying, they thought it would “portray cotton in a bad light.” We laughed at the thought of a Black man being able to portray cotton in a bad light. He used it anyway, making Cotton (2019), an acrylic painting that featured the white logo sharply juxtaposed against a matte black background. In V's mind, anything he took and altered was “7.0'd,” elevated to the ultimate degree.
V often said he pursued these projects to satisfy the curiosities of his younger self. But he also had another, more transgressive motivation. He wanted to wag a finger in the faces of those he called the “purists,” members of high culture's self-serious establishment, even as he became accepted among their ranks. As the celebrated Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas said in a 2019 panel discussion, V used architecture as “an alibi to enter territories to which it has not been invited.” He was, Koolhaas continued, part of a generation of “self-declared wunderkinds amplified by self-organized social media,” a new guard who have accelerated the breakup of borders around professions. V, for his part, explained his disruptive spirit as a way to help the “tourists,” as he termed the younger generation, learn from and get past the older cultural gatekeepers.
As the Ghanaian British architect Sir David Adjaye tells me, “Virgil used his training as an architect, knowing he wasn't going to build buildings, to imagine different possibilities. What we want in the 21st century are different models of being in the world. He decided he was going to make a space for himself, and he took no prisoners.” For Stanescu, his energy was more anarchic. “In a way, I think it was chaos that he thrived on,” she explains. “He wasn't interested in a slick, clean narrative.” V had “this kind of healthy disrespect towards authority and anyone in that position,” she says. “So any gesture then, whether with a museum, whether with galleries…was like a constant fuck you.”
Once V called me to get some advice on a photographer he wanted to hire for a fashion campaign. He was after the kind of freedom of expression found by Black creatives in, say, the Vibe magazine of the 1990s. And he felt stifled. Toward the end of the call, almost as an aside, he said, “The world wasn't designed for us.” As a 6-foot-3 Black man, he felt that the world didn't take him into account, physically or spiritually. So he created another world that did—blowing up Black boys into large-scale, fashionable sculptures; making graffiti-laden paintings; designing gold- and diamond-encrusted paper clip necklaces. Remaking objects in his own image was a message to any young Black kid that their desires and tastes mattered, that had they not been ignored, the world's cultural hierarchies would look different. Like Michael Jordan, V's hometown hero who inspired his long-running collaboration with Nike, and Michael Jackson, the subject of his sophomore fall 2019 outing at Louis Vuitton, he was his own genre.
Even at the end of his life, V kept working. He didn't go public with his battle against cancer. I think he didn't want his art to be pitied. About two weeks before his death, a PDF appeared in our WhatsApp chat with a series of works he wanted added to the show—his typographic collaborations with the conceptualist Lawrence Weiner, a pair of Louis Vuitton films, his Rocawear painting, a bronze chair and bench. “Phase 1,” he said. “If more works in the archive come to mind I will package and send.” I wrote that I'd review the objects and update the exhibition checklist. It was our last exchange. I received news of his death as I was heading to the airport to fly to Miami, where, the week of Art Basel, he was to stage his LV spring-summer 2022 spin-off show. I was meant to meet him for the first in a series of interviews that would form a profile for this magazine.
The Miami show, held on a makeshift barge docked off Miami Marine Stadium, a deteriorating 60-year-old structure marooned in Biscayne Bay, was supposed to celebrate the work V made during the first two years of the pandemic that hadn't been presented to a live audience. Instead, it became a somber tribute to the artist's life, lit up, somewhat jarringly, with fireworks. Ye, Pharrell, A$AP Rocky, Rihanna, and the Arnault family were all in attendance, as were droves of stylists, designers, and friends. A monumental multicolored sculpture of V, dressed in jeans, an LV sweater, and his singular oversized glasses, and holding what appears to be a large portfolio, was erected at the entrance of the show.
I sat in the front row, in shock, watching two men sob uncontrollably as a procession of young male models came down the runway, each representing a different archetype of boyish masculinity—skater, rapper, jock, gender queer, all dressed in the palette of the rainbow. The collection, which featured tulle shirts; bright furs; chicly unconventional, slightly baggy suiting; and spirited leather goods, was as optimistic as ever. At the end of the show, the artisans from V's atelier came to the runway dressed in white and took a bow. The Black designer best positioned to create fashion's first Black heritage brand was gone.
V never mentioned his battle with cancer to me, but a mutual friend told me the news. Just before we began our collaboration, V had taken a three-month break, presumably to undergo treatment. When he returned and I first saw him on Zoom, I was stunned. I hardly knew him and didn't want to ask about his health, but I was concerned. Although he had publicly said that his constant traveling and multitasking had taken a toll on his health, I realized that that wasn't the full story. I wanted to know whether he would be okay. Yet I refrained from asking. He wanted privacy to focus on his work, and I gave it to him.
Regardless, the signs of his struggle were apparent in his art: An Alexander Calder–inspired anvil, made around the time he received the news of his illness, in 2019, was fabricated in pink, the color of breast cancer awareness, and titled Pink Panther. V was suffering from cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare form of heart cancer, but to my mind the allusion was clear: It was his way of acknowledging that he was living with the weight of death. His surrealist use of clouds in his fall 2020 presentation—“cloudification,” in V's vocabulary—was, I think, a pondering of the heavens. The kite motif in his work was, it seems, a symbol of boyhood. The matte gray-on-gray LV clock he gave guests at that show, hands wound counterclockwise, moving back in time, suggested he was an artist nearing the end.
The only quote from V in his memorial brochure, designed by Sultan to reference an old John Cage poster and evoke the minimalism of the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, was a reminder of his joie de vivre and childlike curiosity: “I'm exploring the self-endowed freedom to create. Everyday language, grammar, and my own personal philosophies are equal territory to mine as the art canon.”
Toward the end of the service, after a musical tribute from Lauryn Hill, Arthur Jafa and Theaster Gates rose from their seats flanking me and walked to the podium. Framed by white roses, Jafa took out his iPhone and read an elegy he'd written, a poem titled “Virgil.” One line in particular struck me: “He showed us what god looks like, not in the / heavens, not in our dreams, but god in the / flesh, in the body, in this life.”
In the wake of his death, I came to understand what Jafa may have meant by “god in the flesh.” There was something divinely inspired about the urgency of V's output. He wanted to show us what was possible with a youthful vision. Yet as prolific as he was, V was not in a race against time; he watched and worked the clock better than most. Perhaps he was never racing to create objects because art-making was such a natural process for him, so inherently a part of who he was. I have always been struck by the title of a series of light box portraits he made in London with the German fashion photographer Juergen Teller. One image shows V sitting on a pink stability ball posing alongside some of his art—a large inflatable T. rex, a paint-covered yellow jacket, a United Nations flag taped to the white wall. “What is Virgil Abloh?” the title asks. The use of “what” and not “who” suggests the artist saw himself as an object. As I continue to curate his exhibition, which is scheduled to open in July, that's how I've come to see him. To me, V is the kite he so often referenced, adroitly sailing through a pristine blue sky. As I picture it, I can make out a message, written in Helvetica Neue: Virgil Abloh was here.
ANTWAUN SARGENT is the curator of “Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech,” which will open at the Brooklyn Museum on July 1st.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2022 issue with the title "Finding Virgil."
