Virgil Abloh designed a pair of AF1s for the Figures of Speech guards

The inherent value of the unique guards uniform—monetarily, culturally, cosmically—is, of course, part of the story. In a way, the shirt and sneakers are a living counterpoint to the 1991 work Guarded View of the American artist Fred Wilson, to which Virgil Abloh and Sargent referenced when planning this exhibition “Figures of Speech”. The work features headless mannequins wearing the security uniforms of several of New York’s major museums and evidences the fact that museum guards have historically been some of the only black and brown people employed in these spaces. For their part, the uniforms at the Brooklyn Museum seem like another of the many ways, as Sargent wrote in his eulogy of Virgil, “for V to play into the dynamics of power and history that had largely kept black art outside the white walls of art institutions”.

Virgil Abloh he is not the first to make such a gesture; Sargent mentions artist Akeem Smith, who tapped designer Grace Wales Bonner to outfit attendees of his 2020 Red Bull Arts exhibition in wraparound colored silk robes (oddly enough, Bonner is now the favorite to succeed Virgil Abloh in Louis Vuitton menswear).

How do I report the New York Timescurrently the guards cannot take home the tennis shoes and t-shirts that they wear in the exhibition of “Figures of Speech” (a black t-shirt that reads “PUBLIC SAFETY” on the front and back), and keep them in the lockers from the museum.

Later in the exhibition, I encountered another winding queue—stretching across two galleries—to get into “Church and State”, an exhibition merchandise shop named after Abloh’s personal rejection of the separation between art and commerce. Inside, visitors waited in another line to buy sweatshirts, T-shirts and memorabilia for their personal use or, as some whispered, to resell on the Internet, two goals that Virgil Abloh I would have foreseen and understood. Nearby, a guard made it clear to visitors that even if they applied to work at the museum now, they probably wouldn’t get a pair.