FINDING VIRGIL

But only when I travelled to Chicago for his memorial service did I realize the full extent of his talent and influence. I spent two years trying to bottle up the genius of our greatest multi-hyphenate for a museum show.

- ANTWAUN SARGENT

At the memorial, I sat a few rows behind his family, next to the artists Arthur Jafa and Theaster Gates. It was Monday, the sixth of December, at noon, and we were gathered in the two-storey glass atrium of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, to pay our respects to the artist Virgil Abloh, who had, a week earlier, died of a rare heart cancer at the age of 41. Inside, it was like a sombre Met gala; the assembled crowd included Rihanna, Frank Ocean, Drake, models Karlie Kloss and Bella Hadid, and young designers Kerby-Jean Raymond and Rhuigi Villaseñor. We sat in white chairs in a large light-filled, modernist room that looked out on the city’s skyline. Outside it was cloudy and cold, which mirrored the mood in the room.

The service began with a sermon by Pastor Rich Wilkerson Jr., who had officiated Kim and Kanye’s wedding and first met V, as he was known to those who worked closely with him, during the years he served as Kanye’s creative director. In the wake of V’s diagnosis, in 2019, Rich had become a kind of spiritual adviser, helping him reckon with the work he would leave undone, and here he functioned as a master of ceremonies, inviting V’s wife, Shannon Abloh, to eulogize him. She wore a black silk robe that V had designed, with the word