This September, The Current lights up one of New York’s most enduring design corridors with a series of imaginative window installations.
A beacon of inspiration that celebrates the boundless creativity of luminaries around the world, Urban Electric’s annual artbook-meets-magazine comes to life in the storefronts of Nickey Kehoe, Plain English and Maison Gerard with street theater displays by legendary visual artist Robert Rufino.
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A Street Theater Pioneer Returns To The Stage
Native New Yorker, editor and producer Robert Rufino returns to his early working days of window dressing and design, or as he calls it, street theater, for The Current on 10th Street in New York City in September. Proposing that the throughline of his career has always been that of an artist telling a story, Robert began his career at Henri Bendel in the late seventies, working with the dynamic retailer Geraldine Stutz and Display Director Robert Currie, both of whom he credits with establishing a vision and sensibility to all the work that has followed.
A decade later, he left Bendel’s to join the print world, reporting on fashion for Elle, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, Taxi, and alongside Carrie Donovan at the New York Times. In 1996, the lure of retail and store design beckoned again, this time at Tiffany & Co., where Robert served as the company's worldwide VP of Creative Services. It was 13 years later that Robert moved to interior magazines, and since then, he has added roles at AD, Elle Decor, House Beautiful and Frederic to his resume. He estimates that he has produced over a thousand magazine stories and hundreds of shoots for fashion and interior designers to date, all over the country, but still approaches each one individually "as an opportunity to work through the dimensions and interpret, visually, what I see and feel."
“The beauty and magic of a window display is a little bit of a fantasy
. . . It’s an invitation to step inside.”
— ROBERT RUFINO
