Did you know that multiplatinum and Grammy award-winning R&B superstar Usher is a devoted art collector? Now you do.
For Architectural Digest, the singer opened the doors to his Atlanta home to show off his surprisingly deep collection of contemporary art. Among the works hanging on the walls or installed on the grounds are pieces by Rashid Johnson, Gordon Parks, Sterling Ruby, Fabiola Jean-Louis, Anthony James, Daniel Arsham, Jammie Holmes, Yoshitomo Nara, Michael Stipe, Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, George Condo, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and more.
In particular pride of place is Parks’s famous 1956 color photo of a Black woman and her child outside the “colored entrance” of a department store in Mobile, Alabama. Usher told AD that the photo resides at the entrance to the house in a gesture of both recontextualization and remembrance of the past. Nicole Fuller, Usher’s friend and collaborator on the house, said that the photo served as “inspiration—in palette, in feeling, in moodiness, in tone and texture” for what they wanted to achieve with the design.
Also notable are commissioned portraits of Usher by Julian Schnabel and Lauren Halsey, the latter of which features Usher’s head among a grid of other heads. Condo also produced a commissioned portrait of Usher and his wife Jennifer Goicoechea Raymond.
The spread of photos in AD gives a real sense of not just the artworks on view, but also the interior design of the house, which is clearly highly curated.
