Born in Rockford, Illinois (U.S.A.) in 1980, Virgil Abloh is an artist, architect, and fashion designer. After earning a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he obtained a master’s degree in Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. It was at the Illinois Institute of Technology where Abloh was introduced to a curriculum established by Mies van der Rohe, formed from the notions of Bauhaus, that taught him to combine the fields of art, craft and design. These theories, merged with contemporary culture, make up Abloh’s inter-disciplinary practice today.
Abloh has been the artistic director of Louis Vuitton's menswear collection since March 2018. Abloh is also the chief executive officer of the Milan-based label Off-White, a fashion house he founded in 2013.
Abloh has worked with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, whom he met in 2010 while designing the cover for Kanye West's album 'Graduation'. Abloh was given a solo art show in Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki art gallery in Tokyo, Japan. On numerous occasions their artwork has been showcased together such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Mukarkami's shop Oz Zingaro in Tokyo. In 2018, Abloh and Murakami also collaborated on a series of exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery's outposts in London, Paris and Beverly Hills. Abloh's first solo museum art exhibition occurred at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2019. After Chicago, Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech showed at the High Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition offered a mid-career retrospective of Abloh's endeavors in art, design and music.
