It began with an innocent question from a student intern: “Why don’t we do one of those community reads things?” The other student writers for Electra Street, the arts and humanities journal at NYU Abu Dhabi, thought it sounded like a great idea. I, as the faculty editor, was filled with grown-up skepticism about staging a literary conversation in a city as diverse and seemingly unbookish as Abu Dhabi, which does not even have a library that is open to the public with any regularity. But somewhere between student optimism and faculty skepticism, “Abu Dhabi Reads” took root, and one warm night in early November, more fifty people from all over this desert city gathered in a garden at NYU to talk about Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi.
Everyone has sat on a gray, metal folding chair: waiting at the DMV, as an extra guest at a dinner table, working in a makeshift office. Tanya Aguiñiga, a Los Angeles-based designer, transforms this ubiquitous piece of furniture in her series, Felt Chairs. Aguiñiga spends up to twenty laborious hours lovingly hand-felting each simple folding chair, covering it in vibrant color. Metal becomes a skeleton for bright and singular textured felt, akin to skin. What was cold is now warm, what was common is now individual. How we place ourselves in this chair has changed entirely.
