Friday Favorites 7/6/2012

Cheryl Katz, Contributing Editor
If your heart is racing and you’re seeing spots, don’t panic. You’ve most likely caught the Yayoi Kusama fever. It’s contagious, but you’re in good company.

A retrospective of the eighty-three-year-old Japanese artist’s work is making its way to the Whitney Museum in New York this month, and fashion designer Marc Jacobs’s collaboration with Kusama and Louis Vuitton will be available worldwide starting on July 10. Kusama’s obsessive fascination with repeating dot patterns in her drawings, paintings, sculptures, performance pieces and installations is infectious. It’s hard to look away.

Photos by Jeffrey Katz

Paula M. Bodah, Senior Editor
As a teenager in the 1970s I was a fan of all things tie-dyed. These days you’re not likely to catch me wearing a tie-dyed tee shirt (much less the hip-hugger bellbottoms I wore below them) but you might just find me relaxing on my deck or at the beach in this tie-dyed, limited-edition chair from Cape Cod Beach Chairs. The cotton canvas chair is roomy, comfortable and durable. Extra reinforcing strips under the seat and behind the back provide lumbar support for my middle-aged spine. And, just like those tee shirts I used to make and wear, each chair is a unique work of art.

Photos courtesy of Cape Cod Beach Chairs

Kyle Hoepner, Editor-in-Chief
What was once a 1960s craft experience involving duct tape and dusty samples cadged from the local rug outlet has now reached our part of the world in high style: Boston’s floor store of the moment is the Flor store. The upscale purveyor of imaginatively conceived carpet squares has just opened a location at 236 Clarendon, steps away from the other tony boutiques lining lower Newbury Street. From jazzy jigsaw to muted Mondrian, you (or your designer) can now quickly and easily assemble your own personalized composition underfoot.

Photos courtesy of Flor