The curator and gallerist Alex Tieghi-Walker lives with easygoing pageantry. For the past two years, he and his gallery, Tiwa Select, have shared a rented loft in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood—a space that has become a revolving destination for jewel-box exhibitions, seasonal dinners, and quiet nights with his Mexican street dog, Ivo. “For me, the separation between private and public has always been very blurred,” says Tieghi-Walker, whose knack for knitting together creative communities manifested in Tiwa’s earlier iterations in Los Angeles and northern California. Born in London and raised between Italy and Wales, Tieghi-Walker grew up steeped in hands-on exploration: His historian mother’s work took him to ancient Roman archeological sites, and his artist father’s output ranged from ceramics to handmade kites. After university, Tieghi-Walker landed at Nowness and found his way into British artist circles. It all paved the way for a kinetic career that celebrates design-forward craft by way of friendship and curiosity. “I just painted the gallery last week this lovely shade of ochre yellow, and the days following one of the paint redos are always really exciting to me,” he says, ticking through the previous shades of arsenic green and burnt orange—colors that act as an electric backdrop to the earthenware, wood sculptures, and paintings on view. “So much in life is in flux,” he says, so exerting control over one’s own environment—in this case, the domestic sphere turned downtown cultural hub—“is refreshing.”
