Future Pastime 534 West 26th Street New York, New York Through May 21Imagine a future where we aren’t beholden to smartphones or touchscreens. How would we socialize? How would we get around? What would we wear? Syd Mead offers a kaleidoscopic series of answers in Future Pastime, an exhibition on view in New York City. Celebrated in his lifetime for his masterfully rendered science-fiction concept art, the late designer is often referred to as a “visual futurist,” a sui generis designation that is readily evident in the selection of 16 works dating from 1969 to 2004. “‘Pastime’ is very literal: capturing moments of leisure, of play, of togetherness, of going to sporting events,” William Corman, who curated the show with Elon Solo, told AN. “Syd is able to imbue a sort of familiarness and nostalgia in his works—that’s what makes him so profound.” Space Wheel Interior, 1979 (Courtesy Estate of Syd Mead) The curators intentionally excluded Mead’s most familiar works from the show: his seminal concept art for Blade Runner, Tron, and Aliens, among others. Although Mead’s work has long since entered the cultural imagination as a touchstone of science fiction since the 1970s, he remains more a cult figure than a household name; like author Philip Dick, whose Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was adapted into Blade Runner, Mead’s work remains one degree removed from mainstream pop culture. Corman sees this show as an effort to change that: “For two decades leading up to Hollywood recognizing him—he was 45 years old [when] Robert Wise brought him in to do [his first film,] Star Trek: The Motion Picture—this man was a titan of industrial design and more generally optimistic futurism.” In contrast to the perpetual downpour of Ridley Scott’s dystopian Los Angeles, Future Pastime offers glimpses into bolder, brighter worlds in crisp gouache—and in media res, vividly foregrounding industrial design as storytelling device. Space Wheel Interior (1979) evokes scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Don Davis’s Stanford Torus: Interior View (1975), from MoMA’s recent Emerging Ecologies exhibition, while Moon 2000 (1979) is by far the most restrained piece, a celestial body emerging from chalky white linework. The balance of the works depict dazzling starscapes, social gatherings small and large, or Mead’s signature trope: “Syd loved arrivals—you see that in a lot of his scenes,” Corman related, noting that he had loved to host parties himself. Many of the scenes look like fun: One can almost hear the cheers of the crowd as 20-story-tall robo-hounds—gargantuan incarnations of Boston Dynamics’ quadrupeds—thunder down the track, as in Running of Six Drgxx (1983). Other works depict the specular sheen of chrome in ethereal light; mood-setting use of color, from twilit blues to an otherworldly scarlet; and demigod physiques scantily clad in what Mead called “steel couture.” “In writings that accompany [his preliminary sketches for these works], he tried to make sense of these worlds,” noted Corman, “whether it’s through a sociological perspective or an engineer’s mind—[contemplating] how you would build it even if the tech wasn’t ready.” RAYS Wheels, 1985 (Courtesy Estate of Syd Mead) As prolific as he was prodigious, Mead’s oeuvre ranges from graphic design, including the logo for Tron, to interiors, such as a short-lived Manhattan restaurant and bar, over the course of a career that spanned over half a century. Coming of age in the post-war era, Mead got his start at Ford Motor Company’s Advanced Design Studio upon completing a degree in industrial design at what is now the Art Center College of Design, after a three-year stint in the army. He quickly parlayed his superlative drafting skills and gift for visual communication into a series of commissions for U.S. Steel in the ’60s—Corman generously allows visitors to peruse a coveted copy of Concepts, a 1961 hardbound book illustrated entirely by Mead, depicting dozens of concept vehicles and other use cases for the material—and established his own studio within a decade. Alongside clients such as Philips and Raymond Loewy, architectural renderings were his “bread and butter,” throughout the ’70s and ’80s, as Roger Servick, his partner in life and work, recounted in a fascinating 2023 interview, until CAD software obsolesced hand-rendering in the ’90s. Beyond the garish hues and gorgeous details, the works express an unbridled optimism bordering on outright hedonism, with a few being sensual to the point of campiness. (A wall-sized mural of Pebble Beach (2000), a tour-de-force triptych in the show, can be seen in archival photos/video of Mead in his Pasadena home, where he and Servick had it reproduced at what appears to be tenfold scale.) That a queer reading of works such as Party 2000 (1977), as in Evan Moffitt’s essay for Future Pastime, may be lost on the primary audience of the show—the fanboys skew male, cis-, and het-—scarcely detracts from their appeal. Corman, for his part, is happy to geek out over Mead lore or gush about gouache with all comers. “Going into this, I knew that Syd had many fans from the automotive world, industrial design, cinema… now you’re starting to see fine art people come into the mix.” Party 2000, 1977 (Courtesy Estate of Syd Mead) For all its richness, Future Pastime’s willful escapism comes at an uncanny moment, when the future seems more uncertain—but almost certainly worse—than ever. Ironically, I found out about the show via algorithm: a recommended post, liked by a friend, from the account @syd_mead, which appeared in my feed alongside AI-generated Ghibli artwork, news of car tariffs (!), Severance memes, etc. Meanwhile, the Cybertruck—which Mead lauded upon its unveiling in November 2019, the date in which the original Blade Runner is set—has become a political statement in addition to being a surreal sight against the familiar backdrop of New York City’s polyglot streetscape. Fanciful though his work may be, Mead provided a couple of clues to our present in one work in particular, Running of the 200th Kentucky Derby (1975), in which a spectator brandishes a smartphone-like handheld device while an aircraft labeled “INRNET” hovers overhead. The storied visual futurist certainly foresaw invisible, planetary-scale innovations such as cloud computing, big data, and machine learning; he simply chose to fantasize about their utopian potential as opposed to the darker aspects of distraction, manipulation, and surveillance. (One could make the case that show du jour Severance is the essentially inverse of Meadian futurism: insidious in its mundanity.) After all, Mead started out in 1959, when cars and steel were good for the economy as opposed to bad for the environment; he was, in Servick’s telling, a “hardware guy” through and through. The ineffable materiality of his worlds—sensuously rendered in metal, textile, and flesh—is precisely their appeal. No wonder their inhabitants are fully and enviably present in the moment: enraptured, as in the best works of art. Ray Hu is a Brooklyn-based design writer and researcher.