COURTESY SALON 94
Amid all the Armory Week chaos, New York’s Salon 94 gallery will launch a design program called Salon 94 Design. Run by Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the gallery’s founding director, and American dealer Paul Johnson, the program will kick off tomorrow night and include more exhibitions in the future.
Salon 94 Design’s first show will be “Ghost Dog,” a five-artist group show that takes its name from the Jim Jarmusch film about a samurai-like hitman. Thomas Barger, Jack Craig, Kwangho Lee, and Jay Sae Jung Oh will have work in the show, which also features pieces by the Italian designer Gaetano Pesce, perhaps the most-known of the bunch. The show will be on view at the gallery’s Bowery location, with an opening on Friday, March 3.
“The design world in New York is quite small,” Greenberg Rohatyn said. “I know most of the design galleries—they’re my colleagues, and we share a dialogue.” She added that, with the Salon 94 Design program, she wanted to “increase the footprint” of design in the New York scene.
“Design has a participatory way of communicating with us—it’s very, very direct,” she continued. “You automatically know that a chair is to be sat in, so there’s already a dialogue.” Yet a design object’s form can also greatly exceed its function, “so there’s another dialogue, which is what art does as well.”