Dana Arbib and Tiwa Select Hosted a Design-Week Celebration for “Vetro Alga,” a Seaweed-Inspired Glassware Show

Dana Arbib’s first glassware collection is both a continuation of family history and a reflection of our pandemic-affected moment. The designer visited Venice for the first time in 2020. “As soon as Italian nationals were allowed in, I was like, ‘I’m going’,” she says. “I went and it was empty. There was no one on the street, the water was crystal clear.” (Remember the “nature is healing” videos of canal-swimming dolphins that took over the Internet in the early pandemic days? Those weren’t real, but the water around the city was uncharacteristically clean.) Arbib was there to work with artisans in Murano, and when she took a boat to the island, she marveled at the shades of green and blue, as well as the feathery seaweed, visible below. The lagoon waters became the inspiration for the glass vessels she created, which have names like “Onde” (Waves), and “Marimo” (Algae ball). In varied greens and dusky oranges with bubbled surfaces and organic curves, the pieces would be equally at home under the sea as they are in an artful human home.

Arbib, who previously founded the fashion brand A Peace Treaty, continued her collaboration with Murano artisans over the next two years, traveling repeatedly to Venice from her home in New York. At the same time, her family was uncovering a new connection to the place. Her three-times-removed great uncle Salvatore Arbib had immigrated from Libya to Venice in the late 1800s, where he established a glass-producing facility. “There’s this whole arm of me making the glass in Venice while my family is finding out this stuff about our history in Venice,” Arbib says. “It’s almost like I was supposed to go there at that time.”

Last summer, she was joined in Venice by Alex Tieghi-Walker, the founder of gallery Tiwa Select. They’d crossed paths via mutual design-world friends before (Tieghi-Walker remembers one encounter involving slime-green cake), but the time had come for an official collaboration.

On Friday night, Tieghi-Walker and Arbib hosted a celebration of her inaugural glassware show, “Vetro Alga,” (or Seaweed Glass) at Galerie Michael Bargo. Friends made their way to the Financial District for a meal cooked up by chef Jeremiah Stone of Lower East Side fine-dining staples Contra and Wildair. Arbib-designed plates held traditional Venetian dishes served family-style. There was baccalà mantecato, or whipped salt cod, served on rye crackers, and risotto with red shrimp. Natural wine from Rosie Assoulin’s Vivanterre flowed all night into knobbly yellow glasses that wedged perfectly in the hand (also by Arbib, and very tempting to carry home). Designers—Jonathan Saunders, Lazaro Hernandez, Emmanuel Olunkwa—chatted with Tiwa Select collaborators like textile artist Megumi Shauna Arai and chocolatier Rafael Prietro (the two have created a limited-edition chocolate bar together). As everyone squeezed lemon onto their fried soft-shell crabs, Tieghi-Walker offered a book recommendation: The Land Where Lemons Grow, a history of Italy told through its citrus crops. After a final course of olive oil cake with spruce cream, guests emerged into a foggy New York City night as if returning from a faraway place.