Wrap Your Arms Around Me

Wrap Your Arms Around Me is a collaborative exhibition of historic and contemporary children’s furniture and design presented by Miami’s Gallery Diet and New York City’s kinder MODERN. Wrap Your Arms Around Me examines the ways in which children, small in size, but large in our lives, are both literally and metaphorically embraced, contained, and surrounded by the objects and people they encounter.

Contemporary design by acclaimed international designers Katie Stout (USA), Lucas Maassen (Netherlands), Sarit Shani Hay (Israel), and Philippe Nacson (France), will be displayed alongside pieces of historical significance from the 1940s to the 1980s by ADO (Netherlands), Eero Aarnio (Finland), and Henner Kuckuck (Germany). They will all serve to explore and engender dialogue about the place of the child’s body in the world.

Gallery Diet has commissioned Miami-based painter and MANA Wynwood artist-in-residence Michael Clifford to create a series of paintings which explore the themes and formal principals investigated in the exhibition. The paintings shown were produced in dialogue with the expressive, gestural often naive-like qualities that are a relished quality of childhood. New York City-based artist and Yale MFA graduate Nate Heiges will exhibit a recent body of large works on paper inspired by language. Heiges’ series explores memory and nostalgia and repression in its layering and texture. His work is included in the permanent collection of The Drawing Center, New York; this will be his first exhibition in Miami.