These Tiny, Affordable Nudes Put a Contemporary Spin on a Classical Genre

As NG Collective Studio, sisters Laura Naples and Kristen Giorgi sell their collaborative artworks on Uprise Art, an online gallery representing up and coming talents. That's where we spotted these gestural watercolor Mini Nudes. "I played around with the concept of how, using color and shape, the nude figures could relate to modern elements that we currently see in design and fashion," Giorgi says.
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Week of August 22, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an upstate favorite invades the West Village, an espresso bar flourishes in Florence, and two Danish design icons make beautiful magic together (in ceramic, of course).
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Shiny Cubes and Popsicle Sticks in a California Light & Space Artist’s Retrospective

It’s a sweltering hot day in downtown Los Angeles when I visit California Light and Space artist Peter Alexander’s career retrospective at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, but I feel immediately refreshed upon entering. It isn’t just the effect of the A/C, but also of Alexander’s geometric polyurethane sculptures, their glistening surfaces at once enticingly reflective and mysteriously opaque.
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Anthony Bianco Light & Space

Everything is Illuminated: Anthony Bianco’s Cool, Contemporary Glass Lights

When it comes to working with glass, says designer Anthony Bianco, the journey, so to speak — intense, immersive, rarely improvised — is just as notable as the destination. “The material is so physically demanding,” he says. “I’ve come to appreciate the involvement and the many steps it requires, from understanding the chemistry to creating the colors.” Having discovered a passion for glass nearly two decades ago, it’s a process with which the artist is more than well acquainted.
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Brooklyn furniture studio Uhuru Tack

A Brooklyn Furniture Studio Goes Minimal in Geometric Steel

When we first featured the Brooklyn design-build studio Uhuru, back in 2010, they were known for creating imaginative furniture collections out of salvaged materials, but their newest collection feels like a leap in a whole new direction. After finding success last year with a geometric blackened-steel console called Tack, they've expanded the series to include stools and end tables that would make Donald Judd proud.
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Week of March 1, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A glimpse into the past (the three-year-old side table, pictured above, we can't believe we overlooked), present (six can't-miss art exhibitions happening now), and future (four pieces launching in Milan next month).
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Two Lost Donald Judd Interviews, Part II: On Color and Defining ‘Modernism’

Earlier this summer, when we happened to come across not one but two vibrant, late-'80s interviews with Donald Judd in the same week, we decided it was fate telling us to designate today Judd day here on the site, where we'd excerpt text from both. The second interview we're posting today comes from New York New Art, a 1989 tome that Monica unearthed at an antique mall in Nashville. The interview, with John Griffiths, took place at a Judd exhibition where the artist was showing new pieces in metal and perspex. It covers everything from why Judd began using color to whether the term "Modernism" actually means anything. Read on for more after the jump!
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Two Lost Donald Judd Interviews, Part I: On Cor-Ten Steel and the Scourge of Handiwork

Earlier this summer, when we happened to come across not one but two vibrant, late-’80s interviews with Donald Judd in the same week, we decided it was fate telling us to designate today Judd day here on the site, where we’d excerpt text and photos from both. The first interview we’re posting today comes from Donald Judd Cor-Ten, the 72-page volume that accompanied a David Zwirner exhibition of the same name last winter. Here he speaks with curator and art critic Claudia Jolles about his friendship with Richard Serra, his aversion to public commissions, and why we should never refer to his furniture as art.
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Week of August 15, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, it's all about the upgrade: chic, elemental sculptures to brighten up your desk; a perfectly patterned Poäng; and a bathing suit that'll make your design friends green with envy at the beach.
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Seattle design studio Grain

An Experimental Collection by a Studio at the Forefront of Seattle’s Design Scene

For their textile pieces, the Seattle-based studio Grain has been known to travel far and wide, working primarily with women artisans in Guatemala — after all, that's where founders James and Chelsea Minola first met and fell in love. But for their newest collection, the two stuck a bit closer to home: a rug woven by a textile mill near their alma mater, RISD; wooden trays and benches made in their Bainbridge Island studio; bottle openers cast in a Pacific Northwest foundry; and a glass series made in collaboration with John Hogan.
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Alissa Wagner Dimes

Surprise, Surprise: The Brooklyn Home of Dimes’s Chef is As Gorgeous As Her Food

If you’re not quite sure how a chef like Alissa Wagner fits into Sight Unseen’s usual focus on design and visual art, then you’ve probably never been to Dimes, the restaurant she opened with her longtime friend Sabrina De Sousa in 2013. The pioneer of a new apex of cool on East Canal Street in Manhattan, Dimes sells Cassie Griffin pottery and edible fragrances by Regime des Fleurs, and serves diners bowls of rainbow-colored food on tables inspired by Matisse cut-outs. Some people go because it’s a scene, and because the design vibe is right, but most go because those bowls — filled with things like kale gomae, wild sumac stems, and mejadra — are visual art in just about any sense of the word.
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Matisse-Inspired Prints Marleigh Culver

Matisse-Inspired Prints By a Graphic Designer On the Rise

Much in the way our love for a book is evident in loose binds and worn-out pages, there's a certain value in the way we let beloved things blemish or roughen overtime. The Japanese call this permission of imperfection wabi-sabi — wabi denoting a singular, often uncontrolled uniqueness akin to a flowing streak of paint, and sabi literally meaning "chill" or "withered," which references the beauty of corrosion. Marleigh Culver, a graphic designer at Need Supply by day and visual artist by night, feels a certain kinship with this design approach. "I like sloppy shapes and rough edges, and for my pieces to look like they’ve been moved between houses for generations," Culver says.
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Week of August 8, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: modular lighting, a London home putting a new spin on modernism, and a 5,000-acre “museological complex” that's like Storm King and Longhouse on steroids.
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