“It’s Modernism Week in Palm Springs, and in the city’s Uptown Design District, the Shag Store is bumping. Crowds of people are lined up to meet artist Josh Agle, better known as Shag, whose hyper-colorful and cartoonishly retro serigraph prints are a favorite of the midcentury modern-loving crowd. Agle’s own swinging pad is being featured as part of the week’s tour roster; he’s launching a new line of retro tiles at the fest in partnership with Tesselle and is the big attraction at a pop-up hosted by Dunn-Edwards. (A party at a house he designed was also meant to be one the festival’s marquee events before construction delays waylaid the opening.) In short: If there’s a face of this year’s Palm Springs Modernism Week, it’s Shag.
A participant in the annual event since its official launch in 2006 and in the shopping-centric Palm Springs Modernism Show before that, Shag has become emblematic of the midcentury movement’s rise in the global marketplace over the past decade or so. In that time, Modernism Week itself has changed quite a bit, too, morphing from a small collection of open houses and panels aimed at architecture enthusiasts into a full-on festival celebrating all things mod. This year, from February 16 through 26, there were more than 350 events on the docket, including a robust roster of sold-out three-hour double-decker architectural bus tours and a runway show highlighting vintage fashions from the 1969 Academy Awards. The 11-day event drew more than 100,000 people…”
