Wrap Your Arms Around Me

Wrap Your Arms Around Me was a collaborative exhibition of historic and contemporary children’s furniture and design presented by kinder MODERN and Miami’s Nina Johnson Gallery (formerly Gallery Diet). Wrap Your Arms Around Me examined 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) were displayed alongside pieces of historical significance from the 1940s to the 1980s by ADO (Netherlands), Eero Aarnio (Finland), Henner Kuckuck (Germany), and more. Both the contemporary and vintage design served to explore and engender dialogue about the place of the child's body in the world. 

Nina Johnson Gallery also commissioned Miami-based painter and MANA Wynwood artist-in-residence Michael Clifford to create a series of paintings exploring 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 exhibited a recent body of large works on paper inspired by language. Heiges' series explored memory, nostalgia, and repression in its layering and texture. His work is included in the permanent collection of The Drawing Center, New York; this was his first exhibition in Miami.