At the new Ace Hotel in Brooklyn, each room is a gallery

By Mags Chmielarczyk

Although most museums discourage patrons from touching the art, the crowd at the recent opening for the groovy “Textiles: A Group Show” at the Ace Brooklyn is encouraged to get all up in there. While visitors sip wine at the garden bar, artist Cynthia Alberto and a team of dancers stroll through the hotel lobby cloaked in woven cocoons—an extension of Alberto’s dynamic Techno Love Series. As the night draws to a close, the dancers shed their cocoons and invite guests to don the wearable art.

Meanwhile, an ivory shell by Paige Martin hangs near the ceiling, a warm light emanating from its core. A technicolor boulder by Tamika Rivera sits calmly at the gallery entrance, almost inviting guests to hug it.

“Textiles: A Group Show,” which opened Thursday and is on view through October, represents both emerging artists and New York veterans. The textiles themselves comprise a range of materials and techniques, engaging with activism, healing, personal history, and cultural mythology.

The artists featured in the gallery are responsible for a museum’s worth of custom art pieces hung throughout each room of the hotel—the latest chapter in Ace’s design-oriented approach to hospitality: 287 pieces make up the in-room collection, and the custom artworks are permanent installations in the gallery space.

Caroline Kaufman’s playful tufted art carries a sense of nostalgia and childhood wonder. Sagarika Sundaram’s visceral felted tapestries investigate the materiality of wool and its relationship to human biology and psyche. Chi Nguyễn’s fiber art reflects on race, feminism, economic justice, immigrant rights, and reproductive justice; while Rowan Renee’s intricate archival work examines how queer identity is mediated by the law.

A guest embraces “An offering to Atabey” by Tamika Rivera

Out of the hotel room, into the public eye
Ace Hotel Brooklyn is shaping up to be a hub for cultural events: On September 23, the Hotel garden will host Club WONDER, the first in a series of poetry readings organized by New York based WONDER Press. Black Folks in Design will inhabit the gallery in November, and the textile series will conclude with experimental work from the Textile Arts Center in December.

Ace invited artist Niki Tsukamoto to curate their in-room artist initiative back in 2019. Tsukamoto, who has worked in fiber for over 20 years and is the co-founder of Lookout & Wonderland Workshop, decided to root the project in the surrounding borough.

“I have a deep love for Brooklyn and a real, personal connection with the fiber arts community here,” she says. “My goal was to cultivate a true sense of community around the property.”

Twenty-four artists produced work for the in-room program, along with 13 artists from Weaving Hand, a Brooklyn based weaving studio and healing arts center. Both Niki and her partner, Yusuke Tsukamoto, contributed pieces via Lookout & Wonderland.

Throughout the curation process, Tsukamoto worked closely with each artist to design work that would harmonize with their interior habitats. She briefed the artists on the materiality, size, and color palette of each room, but emphasized the importance of their individual visions. Unlike the homogeneous design of a typical hotel, the rooms in Ace Brooklyn are unique and varied in their layouts. In certain “irregular” rooms that lacked wall space, Tsukamoto was able to collaborate with artists on site-specific installations.

For Tsukamoto and Marie van Eersel, cultural programmer at Ace New York and Ace Brooklyn, it was essential to draw the artists out of the hotel rooms and into the public eye. The gallery opening marked a culmination of efforts from a community of working artists, many whose practice has been deeply affected by the pandemic. “People came to support their friends. Artists that have moved upstate drove four hours to come down and be at the opening,” Tsukamoto says. “It was a beautiful thing to see.”

Van Eersel has invited the textile collective to host workshops in the gallery space and encourages the group to propose new installments throughout the year.

“Creating cultural programming in a hotel means bringing art and culture to a space that is alive–it is an ecosystem of its own,” says van Eersel. “You are dealing with a space that has its own rules and agenda, but that presents tremendous creative opportunities.”