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A wall of chocolate bars and fresh cut flowers—can you think of anyone who wouldn’t want to shop for themselves or a Dear One in these friendly retail hubs? We hear a new global location is in the works.

What can we say about an indie retail mini-chain that parks its proverbial car in the garage of “salt, chocolate, bitters, and flowers”? Meet me at The Meadow, launched in 2006 and headquartered in Portland, Oregon, with three neighborhood shops and an outpost in New York’s NoLita. (Another location in Tokyo – TOKYO! – sadly closed during the pandemic.) Its mission? To be that little shop that makes your town the place you love to love. Dubbing their salespeople “shop guides,” The Meadow presents what owners refer to as their most prized discoveries: “products that tell stories of tradition, values, pleasure and celebration.” The flagship space is located in the Nob Hill section of Portland, with 400+ chocolate bars in stock; Southeast Portland is the largest of the four spaces, with the most emphasis on pantry items; North Portland is the retailer’s first shop, with the largest collection of salts (the website encourages shoppers to stop by and taste “strange and enticing foods”—love that!); and New York’s NoLita shop is a move across town for The Meadow, which had a spot in the West Village for more than 10 years before relocating in 2021. It seems like even the construction of The Meadow was meant to make it quietly stand out from the masses. The first shop was built out of old-growthDouglas fir andcedar planks reclaimed from old factory buildings, and other buildouts followed suit. Per management, “In 2006nobody thought to build with such materials, and that was thecheapestwood wecould find!The original idea for the shop was to create a place that felt like coming home, surrounded by things wefelt most passionate about: gourmet salt, artisan chocolate, cocktail bitters, wine, and fresh cut flowers.” On its website, find a breakdown of how many kinds of chocolates, salts and bitters are stocked in each brick-and-mortar store, and we advise you don’t shop hungry. Sounds like a fifth location may be in the works, too.

P.S. The retailer’s book Salted: A Manifesto won a James Beard Award! Talk about “The Little #OMG That Could!”

We’ve written about art in our Innovation section before, for good reason, because art evolves, morphs, and shifts almost daily. Today, art and how it's presented is innovation itself, and a walk through several exhibits currently on display in New York reinforces how it has become a full body experience—#OMG from head to toe. At MoMA, artist Rafik Anadol asks us to ponder, “What would a machine dream about after seeing the collection of The Museum of Modern Art?” He answers with a large-scale installation that uses artificial intelligence to transform the museum’s more than 200 years of work into real time, continuously displaying otherworldly forms that can be viewed from two different floors—a meditation on technology, creativity, and modern art. Anadol trained his machine-learning model to interpret the publicly available data of MoMA’s collection, reimagining it in terms of what might have been and what it could become. Housed in the Museum’s Gund Lobby, the piece is impacted by the shifts in light, movement, acoustics, and weather out the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Meanwhile, the work of Nick Cave, our cover artist, is on display at The Guggenheim, with an exhibit made up of elaborate installations and textile works, including his iconic Soundsuits, which blend sculpture, costume design, and instrument-making. The title of the exhibition, “Forothemore,” is a neologism, a new word that reflects the artist’s lifelong commitment to creating space for those who feel marginalized by dominant society and culture and sort of brilliantly sucks the air out of this dinosaur of an institution, infusing it with blood and guts and life from the street. And speaking of the street, another major exhibition, downtown this time, traces the rise and proliferation of hip-hop through five decades. Titled “Hip Hop: Conscious, Unconscious,” this collection of more than 200 photographs that range from 1972 to 2022 hangs at Fotografiska, our fave new art-gazing spot, where you can stroll cocktail or coffee in hand and DJ-curated music filling your ears, making art just one of the five senses to savor. That is innovation at its FIERCEST. Also well worth seeing at Fotografiska: Un/Masked, from Elizaveta Porodina. The artist, who was a clinical psychologist before teaching herself how to use a camera, explores themes of magic and mirage.

Mural art causes a bit of a back-and-forth tennis-tournament type of conversation in the contemporary art world. Detractors insist that murals should take a back seat to canvas, while staunch supporters remind us that these large-scale works are imperative to bringing art to the public and making people more aware. In public works, murals have been employed to liven up areas of urban blight and function as outdoor art museums (the Wynwood Mural tour in Miami comes to mind). Their sheer size makes murals an ideal communication tool for political statements or social commentary. But let’s turn a luxuriously languid eye to the world of fine-art murals, and those commissioned for upscale restaurants and private homes. We SWOON over the murals behind the bar at Le CouCou and Veronika, both in New York City, so imagine our delight to find out they were both done by the same fine-arts decorative painter, Dean Barger, out of Maine and in conjunction with design studio Roman and Williams. For Le Coucou, the hand-painted mural was based on the work of 18th Century French landscape painter Hubert Robert. At Veronika, a restaurant housed inside the Fotografiska Museum, a mystical bohemian forest landscape mural sets the tone for a sexy sip or two. (See Innovation for more on what’s currently hanging on those walls.) Barger and his team are available to transform your home into a divine setting, offering decorative installations in the form of murals, of course, but also floor and ceiling finishes, gilding, and more. In an interview with “Stylish With Jenna Lyons,” the artist shed this insight on how he usually begins his work, whether for commercial or private clients (the latter of which are naturally hush-hush, so use your imagination): “I work to create a faraway point of infinity, some distant misty part of the mural that draws the view into the wall. I like my murals to recede back, dematerializing the space rather than jumping off the walls screaming for attention.” We call that quiet opulence, and we whisper #attentionmustbepaid.