New York is a city of icons. Heck, its logo (I ❤️NY, anyone?) is as synonymous with the city as it is instantly recognizable throughout the world. The Big Apple in recent years has picked up a few other symbolic signifiers along the way that have become just as representative of the city that never sleeps.
So much so, when Ghanaian palanquin artist Paa Joe teamed up with designer gallery Superhouse for ‘Celestial City’, the inaugural show in its new gallery space, what emerged from Paa’s studio could be classified as the new icons of New York (with some familiar favourites thrown in for good measure). There’s the ‘Statue of Liberty’, for one, and the golden NYC ‘Yellow Cab’, which Paa rendered into a 7.5ft-long hand-carved wood coffin, fully lined in green satin and Dutch Wax, replete with little accuracies like the car’s stick shift and windshield wipers (and of course, signage announcing the ‘Paa Joe x Jacob Art Academy’.) But perhaps it’s the ‘Hermès Birkin Bag’, or the ‘The New York Times’ with Paa’s portrait on it, too, that really hammer home that New York is a city of signs, symbols and metonyms.
