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From pencil skirts … to pencil drawings.
The thought that crawled when I heard that Kim Newport Mimran is opening an art hub this month. Called Cultural Goods Gallery, to be exact — a 2,500 square foot space in The Junction, on Dupont — it is a venture that the Pink Tartan designer is starting with her fashion pasha husband, Joe Mimran.
Not so much an evolution for the Toronto power couple as it is a kind of modish déjà vu, it turns out. A throwback to the earlier days of Joe, who went on to famously found Club Monaco, and would, even later, alas, become the Joe in Joe Fresh.
“The first gallery Joe had was Starving Artists on Scollard Street (in Yorkville) when he was 19. I guess he never got it out of his system.” Kim reminded me this week.
When I asked about the name they chose, and whether the idea of just calling it the Mimran Gallery was ever considered, she shooed away that idea. “It is not about the Mimran, it is more about creativity and what is happening in the world around us.“
“Cultural Goods Gallery is open to the presentation of all things creative that impact our culture today,“ she emphasized. “That was the inspiration for the name.”
A bang: what they are starting with.
The inaugural exhibition — which is already shaping up to be one of the surprise delights of the Fall social calendar — takes its cue from legendary New York-based artist Al Diaz, who rewrote the rules of street art and was Basquiat’s OG partner in crime, so to speak. Titled FROM SAMO© … TO SAMO© … EVOLUTION OF STREET: ART & TYPE, the show opens in late October (starting with VIP cocktails on the 26th). It comes curated by Grace Zeppilli & Jason Halter, and will include fresh works from Toronto-based artists Javid Jah, Danilo Deluxo McCallum, Kismet, and Alfalfa.
The DNA of the show is also a nod — inadvertently or not — to the couple’s own art awakening when they were back and forth between Manhattan and here. “During our years in New York, our offices were in Chelsea — my office was at 25th and 11th and Joe was on 26th Street — we had the opportunity to frequent the various galleries in the area regularly,“ Kim shared. “We saw so many amazing artists, from emerging, mid-career to blue chip. Always a source of inspiration and great joy. Art appreciation is a personal experience, yet so many of the pieces we gravitate toward seem to align.”
Certainly, the Mimrans have been collecting for a long time, their midtown manse — which shares the same breathtaking view of the Toronto skyline as nearby Casa Loma — a cornucopia itself. Faves include British artist Clare Woods, German painter Jonathan Meese, and American neo-realist George Condo. Kim, in particular, has long gravitated toward sculptures. A Thomas Houseago mask, positioned on a plinth, sits in their home, and a Yoshitomo Nara painting is situated on a wall, as featured a few years back in Insight magazine.
There is also a long-time appreciation of classic photography — a nod to the working relationship Joe had with legendary snapper Richard Avedon. His stark black-and-white images helped define the Toronto-sprung Club Monaco in its early years.
Is this a way for the Morocco-born son of a couturier to satisfy a more creative itch, since stepping away from the trenches of fashion, as he did, several years ago? As he told The Star around then, about pivoting to a gig as a panellist on CBC’s “Dragon’s Den,” and the new audience that seemed to have found him, “I used to have stylish young women come up to me on the street. Now, it’s middle-aged guys with a business plan who want to take a selfie with me.”
Having your own gallery? Certainly, one way to inject a new blast of cool.
Fresh. Joe.
Indubitably, the symbiosis between the fashion and art worlds is nothing new. It has been going since the days of Christian Dior, who had an art gallery, in Paris, in the late 1920s — years before the designer would go on to define the “New Look” in 1947.
It has only deepened in more recent times. On a much bigger scale, Miuccia Prada — long an art devotee — founded the Fondazione Prada back in the 1990s, and opened a permanent museum in 2015. Ditto: fashion mega-tycoons Bernard Arnault and Francois Pinault, who are both in the game. The latter, who already had two museums in Venice, expanded his might further, in 2021, with a mega-museum in Paris. His tent-pole brand, Gucci, meanwhile, has embraced both fine and street artists, and last year launched an artist’s residence program.
Arnault, likewise, has the Fondation Louis Vuitton — also in the City of Light — and Louis Vuitton, the brand, has long collaborated with artists. Marc Jacobs, when he was its head designer in the aughts, perhaps moved the needle the most when he gave pop-art pro Stephen Sprouse free rein over the LV monogram — the first time that privilege had been extended since 1896.
Society making incursions in gallery-land has also been going for some time. A decade-plus ago, for example, fashion designer and ex-model Dasha Zhukova — wife then of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich — opened a new exhibition celebrating Russian modern art at her refurbished Moscow gallery.
In India, meanwhile, industrialist Abhishek Poddar is getting ready to open the doors of the Museum of Art and Photography, in Bangalore. Home to a collection, 6,000-objects deep — with a lens squarely on South Asian visual culture — it debuts this December. Plenty of buzz already about it in the art world.
Right here in Toronto, the late shoe matriarch and philanthropist Sonja Bata was on the vanguard. She poured her lifelong obsession with footwear into one of the most unique museums in North America — a.k.a., the Bata Shoe Museum.
About this newest addition to the art scene, in this town, Kim finally tells us this, “Cultural Goods Gallery is a reflection of our decades of learning, collecting and collaborating with artists from around the world.”
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