Inside Google Shopping’s Dinner With Hassan Pierre at Miami Art Week
If Google Shopping is a style search engine, then Hassan Pierre is a human one. On the eve of Miami Art Week, ELLE’s new European editor-at-large partnered with the tech platform to welcome a guest list to The EDITION hotel that read like a Wikipedia page for art world royalty in 2024.
In the time it took to clink two champagne glasses, Pierre had already given warm hugs to Smithsonian painter Mickalene Thomas, jewelry designer Anita Ko, Gagosian curator and Gucci muse Antwaun Sargent, and art book publisher Sharon Coplan Hurowitz. Nearby, Art Basel’s senior outreach advisor, Princess Alia al-Senussi, sat with curator Isolde Brielmaier. “So much great art comes from a strong community,” Google exec Stephanie Horton tells ELLE. “When Hassan gets people together, that community comes naturally.”
Gagosian curator Antwaun Sargent and artist Kennedy Yanko.
The crowd was there to toast Derrick Adams, the Baltimore native whose work is currently on view at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris—and on tees and tote bags produced in collaboration with Google Shopping, which will be available during Art Basel Miami Beach. “Making waves in the art industry means going to places where your work can be seen in new ways,” says Adams, whose work has also appeared in major museums and galleries, plus TV shows like Insecure and Empire and even as a mosaic installation on the walls of a Brooklyn subway station. “You don’t need to be everywhere, but you need to be, very deliberately, somewhere.”
“Style Variation 3” by Derrick Adams.
Before a dinner prepared by Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the artist spoke with journalist and news anchor Lola Ogunnaike about his creative process, which has yielded over two dozen solo shows and an installation the National Mall in Washington, D.C. “Like every American, and certainly every Black American, there are things in my life that make me feel sad and angry,” Adams confesses. “But in my studio, I can control the narrative. I can say, ‘This is a space of joy, so you’d better come in and take some of this joy out with you.’”
Lola Ogunnaike and Derrick Adams.
“You keep scrolling a few pages down [on Google] and you’ll see images that oppose what is shown at the top of the search window. You don’t see statesmanship or struggle. You see Martin Luther King Jr. on a family vacation, on a beach in Jamaica. Everyone has a break. That break is joy. Let’s look at that, too.”
The artist Mickalene Thomas at The Miami Beach EDITION.
Lobster was served. Tote bags emblazoned with Adams’s art were passed around. So were Instagram handles, phone numbers, and promises among the dinner guests to meet on the beach the next day. “We came here with ideas but we leave with friends,” Pierre says. “That’s also a kind of art.”
Faran Krentcil is a fashion journalist and critic based in New York City. She is the founding editor of Fashionista and a graduate of Duke University. Her work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and more.