Google Toasts “Unfinished Projects” by Solange Knowles, PinkPantheress, and Joe Burrow

Google Chrome threw a party at the High Line on Thursday night to launch its “Unfinished Projects” exhibition, in which Solange Knowles, PinkPantheress, and Cincinnati Bengals quarterback/chess enthusiast Joe Burrow use Google’s tools to move their passion projects forward. Solange used them for a copper sculpture that grew out of an unfinished sculptural idea she first developed in 2019 and has now become her first public large-scale sculpture. PinkPantheress put her own twist on the ballet slipper flats that she admired as a child in the ’00s. And Burrow dismantled a number of things that art school students want to think they know about jocks.

At sunset, guests milled and drank cocktails after entering through a 14th Street High Line access point across from Pier 57. A DJ spun while waiters offered canapés, and pedestrians on the walkway below snapped photos of a southbound cruise ship on the Hudson. Attendees queued at about 7 p.m. outside a simple white entry marquee emblazoned with “Unfinished Projects” in the familiar Google geometric sans-serif font.

James Croome, Senior Director of Marketing at Google, addressed the attendees, reflecting on all the ways Chrome tools can help manifest visions. He noted that the tools can be used in a personal way to schedule family needs or to structure work obligations in every industry, from arts and music to the NFL, and everywhere in between.

Inside the pavilion, three exhibitions showed the creators’ visual thinking methods. They used old-school tools: original handmade sketches are displayed on the temporary walls, video shows Knowles and PinkPantheress sketching on paper; the same is true for Burrow, whose on-camera tools at one point include a classic twisty plastic yellow mechanical pencil with the clip broken off.

Knowles’ copper sculpture, which premiered on the High Line just below the multimedia partnership space, grew out of a sculptural idea initially developed for the 2019 Venice Biennale. The finished work brings her sculptural practice into a public setting at this scale for the first time. Her development process moved back and forth between hand drawings, small resin forms she learned to cast herself during the pandemic, plexiglass models, tests with sheets of copper, and digital renderings used to work out scale and proportions. Chrome served principally as a research and organizational tool, helping her manage and compare references that ranged from ancient Egypt to Fred Eversley.

PinkPantheress, meanwhile, put her own twist on the ballet flats and early-2000s styles she grew up with. The finished concept pairs a transparent outer shoe with patterned pieces that can be switched out underneath it, while removable magnetic decorations offer another means of altering the look. The possibilities she explored ranged from stripes and polka dots to lace, bows, pearls, crystals, hearts, and a recurring crown motif. Much of the early work remained decidedly low-tech—sketches, fabric samples, and experiments with materials—while Chrome’s Split View helped her keep online references beside the designs she was developing.

For Burrow, the intersection was chess and geology. He has played the game since elementary school and has spoken about how it informs him on the playing field. He worked through shapes, proportions, and stone combinations digitally before committing them to materials. The finished board uses marble squares individually set into a walnut base supported by steel, while the pieces grew out of experiments with an assortment of minerals. Agate and onyx were among the possibilities considered; fluorite made it as far as fabrication before proving too fragile for a knight, which cracked and was replaced with malachite.

What the tools enable, then, is to avoid steps that may not be within the user’s wheelhouse or talent cluster. Knowles, Burrow, and PinkPantheress all used traditional sketching methods, but the digital mockups and research tools show that a stiff or awkward drafting hand need not stop a conception of the mind’s eye that is lucid and confident. Tactile interactive elements of the displays were especially fun. Screens were activated in some spots by placing numbered objects from the projects in front of them rather than by touch alone.

Artist, photographer, and filmmaker Tyler Mitchell, who has worked extensively with Solange since 2018, and photographed all three artists’ journeys, described “Unfinished Projects” well when he addressed the crowd as it lined up to enter the presentation, saying, “You wouldn’t think immediately of PinkPantheress as architecting her own ballet flat, or Joe Burrow as making a chess set, or Solange debuting her first public sculpture on the High Line necessarily, but I personally find it beautiful that Chrome is giving space to these people to think expansively, to exist beyond the limits of what we as a public demand of these artists and of these people, and I feel lucky to have photographed them in the process.”