Talking to architect and designer Rafael de Cárdenas is an encyclopedic experience. In the first five minutes of our conversation, there are floating references to S, M, L, XL, a book by influential architecture firm OMA; a Donna Summer cover of a Vangelis song featured in the HBO drama Industry; and movie reviews written by the late downtown gossip columnist Stephen Saban.

While the subject of our conversation is, ostensibly, art collecting, these tangents are important indications of de Cárdenas’ aesthetic life. His approach to curating and collecting is equally expansive, forgoing academic restrictions and fashionable commercialization. Instead, de Cárdenas intuitively appreciates how disparate objects can connect. His own collection, for example, includes paintings by little-known folk artist Ralph Redpath, pottery by New Mexico leader Johnny Santiago Adao Ortiz-Concha, and a tuft of hair by Yuji Agematsu.

“I have a very short attention span. I get bored easily with things,” de Cárdenas said. “I don’t think I have an approach – there’s this idea that there’s some kind of tornado, and things get grabbed along the way.”

De Cárdenas’ free-wheeling, “just-move-it” approach also led to his latest venture into the art world: the designer collaborated with the Children’s Museum of the Arts (CMA) in New York. to present “Hold Me”, a curated exhibition and benefit auction of works donated by artists from around the world, which opens on October 3. (Bid on Artsy through October 6.)

“I’ve seen Rafael shake things up that way, fix things, find those moments,” said CMA chief executive Seth Cameron. “Even though he thinks deeply about his work, there is still this intuitive aesthetic relationship where you have to make decisions based on phenomenological experience – does that feel right to you or not?”

“Hold Me” will feature works by artists ranging from craftsmanship icon Anni Albers and architect Drew Seskunas to the mother-daughter artist duo of sculptor Linda Lopez and her son. five years, Oona. As they beg to be held, examined and kissed, the pieces on display take viewers back to the intimacy and curiosity of childhood. Cameron said he aimed to establish a whimsical, hermetic universe of objects – a “cabinet of curiosities” – and allow de Cárdenas to move those objects with a sense of childlike wonder that is integral to the philosophy of the museum.

“Play is not something that is quarantined in childhood, but is part of how we navigate the world throughout our lives,” Cameron said, explaining his philosophy in running the museum. . The institution supports several programs such as artist-educators in residence, as well as the Look Make Show, a digital learning center that makes arts education accessible to children. “Our objective [at the CMA] is to bring children who are often separated from the creative space of the art world and let them influence us and be part of our way of thinking,” Cameron continued. “We learn from things that children do; they learn things adults do. This exchange looks a lot like a tornado.

This ideal joins the work of de Cárdenas. While there is a youthful play to his freewheeling curation, his broader aesthetic and artistic life is also deeply connected to his own youth. “My childhood was spent imagining my future and pretending to be that future, emulating that future at that time,” de Cárdenas said. “For me, everything was up for grabs. When I created a mythical universe, I incorporated a chair from the living room, brought an ashtray, [or] a Penthouse magazine that I had kept under my bed for five years.

The self-proclaimed “gay kid in a straight household” might find power and self-definition in an intentional arrangement of objects, a certain Donna Summer song, or a gossip columnist’s movie reviews. “All of those things felt ambitious,” Cárdenas said, but they also felt like fun. The chemistry between these sentiments permeates his aesthetic philosophy to this day.

His plastic spool facade for the Kenzo flagship store in Seoul and his kaleidoscopic Cartier Tokyo boutique, for example, use unconventional surfaces to evoke the history and materiality of the products sold inside. In his role as advisor to the Object & Thing art and design fair, he eliminated traditional fair structures such as booths or even placards in favor of organized groups of works by different artists, which de Cárdenas organizes himself.

As de Cárdenas and Cameron discussed with me the collection and curation of this story, they kept coming back to discussions of play, aspiration, and the permeable exchange between childhood and adulthood. For de Cárdenas, this exchange feels like an unbroken chain of inspiration, self-determination and unstructured experimentation that stretches back to his youth.