Claire Dorn
Thandiwe Muriu, A constellation of power, 2025
The friendship between Pharrell Williams and French mega gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin goes back to a meeting in Miami, during Art Basel, in 2007. They connected over their love of Takashi Murakami’s work. Their artistic collaboration started with the 2008 design exhibition Perspectives, a series of colorful anthropomorphic chairs. In 2014, Pharrell was invited to curate the hugely successful show G I R L after the release of his eponymous album, with artists like Daniel Arsham, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Bharti Kher, JR, Andy Warhol, Marina Abramovic and many others.
Esther Mahlangu, Untitled, 2023
Now comes the new partnership between Vuitton’s men’s creative director and Perrotin called FEMMES (“women”). Pharrell has selected the work of 40 women artists, some from the gallery, but a few from other galleries, “with a focus on the multifaceted nature of black womanhood.” Among the stars of contemporary art, artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Mickalelene Thomas, Zanele Muholi or Tavares Strachan, Pharrell has chosen artists from the younger generation - Gaëlle Choisne, recent winner of the Prix Marcel Duchamp, American Nina Chanel Abney, one of the most exciting young African American artists, or Kenyan photographer Thandiwe Muriu. “At its heart, FEMMES is an anthem, leading the marching band of Black joy by creating spaces for ongoing and future cultural shifts. It is a celebration, a call to honor the artists—these Soldiers of Love— who transform the world through the power of their hands” writes noted author and curator Louise Thurin.
Claire Dorn
We had met Pharrell in London in 2014 for the release of his album G I R L after the monumental Happy which had become a world anthem. That day, Pharrell had made clear his devotion to and admiration for all the women in his life - mother, partner, collaborators, etc. - and his desire to celebrate them and give them their due. In the 2014 show at Perrotin’s he had made sure to include the activist group Guerilla Girls’s iconic 1989 poster “Do women have to be naked to get to the Met. Museum?” featuring Ingres’s Grande Odalisque wearing a gorilla mask, which the collective had shown on the back on New York City buses after it was rejected by the Public Art Fund which had commissioned it.
On the day of the opening, the crowd who had come to the Perrotin gallery, in Paris’ Marais district, was strikingly different from the one usually seen at openings or even in galleries in general - younger, more diverse, more female also. Let’s hope Pharrell’s celebration of women spills into the kind of people who visit art galleries on weekends and not only on opening night.
~Jean-Sébastien Stehli
FEMMES. Curated by Pharrell Williams. Perrotin Paris. Until April 19. perrotin.com
Carrie Mae Weems, Nina, 2009 - 2025
