The Winter 2022.23 Issue of American Vogue takes us to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on upper Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Model Ajok Daing is our guide to view “Alex Katz: Gathering,” curated by Katherine Brinson. The show opened in late October, and you can view the Katz exhibit through February 20, 2023.

The fashion story “Go Big!” trends both the paintings and our spring 2023 focus on very large bags. Max Ortega styles this delicious fashion story lensed by Alex Webb [IG]./ Hair by Evanie Frausto; makeup by Raisa Flowers; set design by Mila Taylor-Young

For readers not familiar with New York City geography, when Ajok Daing is posing outside the museum, she is facing the east side of Central Park.

Encompassing paintings, oil sketches, collages, drawings, prints, and freestanding “cutout” works, the exhibition begins with the artist’s intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway from the late 1940s and culminates in rapturous, immersive landscapes that have so dominated his artistic output in recent years.

“He’s someone I’ve admired for a long time,” the Guggenheim director, Richard Armstrong, told the Times, singling out the last 10 years of Katz’s career — from age 85 on — as especially brilliant.

What an inspiring thought — to create your best work after age 85. Admitting to a grave omission on the part of the Guggenheim, Armstrong realized that Katz had never appeared at the Guggenheim and the museum owned none of his paintings or other artworks.

Katz did have a retrospective at the Whitney in 1986.

American designer Claire McCardell, deeply celebrated on an ongoing basis by designer Tory Burch, caught Alex Katz’s eye decades ago. Her spirit is a major muse behind the current exhibition.

Katz, who is not a fan of the superfluous or fussy in any art form, tells the New York Times how “unaffected” her designs were: “They’re perfect now because everything is so pretentious,” he says. “The idea was, you can spend the day welding and go home and cook some hamburgers outdoors and wear the same clothes.”

Those words don’t apply to most of us fashion-lovers. However, it’s WONDERFUL to see Vogue US attach itself to an exhibition in this way.

AOC is certain that with more focus on these cultural interminglings, Vogue could find significant amounts of cash to support fashion stories like this one — even if it comes from crazy places like Bank of America, the main sponsor of the Guggenheim’s Alex Katz retrospective. See the entire list of donors to the retrospective here.