The Shed in Manhattan will fill its McCourt and Darla Moore Gallery with nearly 1,000 objects from Virgil Abloh's personal archive starting December 10, when Virgil Abloh: The Codes opens across 28,000 square feet of the institution. The exhibition runs through January 18, 2027, tracing the late designer's work across fashion, footwear, art, architecture, graphic design and music.
According to The Shed, the show is presented by the Virgil Abloh Foundation in partnership with Nike and The Virgil Abloh Archive, which itself holds more than 20,000 objects from Abloh's creative practice. Abloh founded the Milan-based label Off-White in 2013 as a platform for experimentation, and in 2018 he was appointed Men's Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton. He died in November 2021 at age 41.
A Recreated Paris Studio and a Media Lab Full of Raw Files
Curators Chloe Sultan and Mahfuz Sultan assembled finished works alongside prototypes, sketches and archival materials for the New York presentation, as Nike detailed in its announcement. The exhibition recreates Abloh's Paris office at Pont Neuf, a space that served as a gathering point for his collaborators and for emerging creatives passing through his orbit. An interactive media lab will also give visitors access to selected raw design files, part of what the Nike release describes as an exploration of remixing, collaboration and combining familiar things in unexpected ways.
A retail experience co-curated by JJJJound founder Justin Saunders will accompany the exhibition, alongside merchandise developed specifically for the show. Shannon Abloh said that Virgil believed in opening doors and making knowledge accessible, a sentiment the exhibition's programming appears designed to reflect. The Virgil Abloh Foundation notes that a month-long schedule of public programming, including conversations, performances and workshops, will run alongside the galleries.
Ticket Prices and Free Admission for Students
General admission tickets went on sale Friday starting at $25, the Foundation's site confirms, with proceeds benefiting the Virgil Abloh Foundation's work supporting opportunities for emerging creatives. Students and educators can attend for free with proof of ID and a timed ticket reservation, and visitors under 18 can enter at no cost as well.
The New York show opens about five years and one month after Abloh's death and continues to draw major institutional attention. Footwear Magazine notes that the exhibition connects Abloh's design methods with the approach behind his Nike collaboration, The Ten, linking his broader design philosophy to one of his most recognized sneaker projects.
How It Follows Earlier Codes Editions and the Brooklyn Retrospective
The New York presentation follows earlier editions of The Codes staged in Miami and Paris, according to Footwear Magazine's report. The most recent of those, at the Grand Palais from September 30 to October 9, 2025, was described by the venue as an expanded edition of a 2022 presentation and featured 20,000 archival pieces, including prototypes, sketches, objects and images from Abloh's personal collections, per the Grand Palais.
New York has its own history with Abloh retrospectives. Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech, billed as the first museum exhibition devoted to his work, ran at the Brooklyn Museum from July 1, 2022, through January 29, 2023, spanning two decades of his practice with collaborations from artists including Takashi Murakami, Arthur Jafa and photographer Juergen Teller, as the Brooklyn Museum describes it. That show, which WWD reported mixed fashion, large-scale sculpture, immersive spaces, videos and sketches, stood as the first posthumous retrospective of Abloh's career before The Codes now brings a new scale of material to The Shed this winter.
