Luren Jenison tends to describe her professional life as a “wild goose chase” — a neverending manic hunt through thrift stores, flea markets, and even forests to find the vintage oddities, natural artifacts, and textiles she uses in her elaborate installations. She’s constructed woodland scenes with foraged moss and taxidermied foxes for internal meetings at Anthropologie, set up tableaux with vintage books and building blocks for weddings and corporate galas, and even traveled all the way to China once to find a master joss-paper artisan to help her build a shimmery paper R.V. for a Free People store (he later panicked and pulled out of the project). And yet no matter how spectacular the results, at the end of the day they’re almost all temporary, set up for a night or a week or a month and then disassembled into their constituent parts to be trashed or banished to storage. Only the hunt goes on.
If there’s one place you’d expect to find any permanent evidence of Jenison’s talents as both a visual stylist and an eagle-eyed picker, though, it would be in her own home — for the past four years she’s shared two huge floors of an old row house with her friend Kevin McGuinness, and together they use it as a studio, a vitrine, and from time to time, a speakeasy where other friends can sample their homemade bitters and botanical infusions. There’s typically a selection of wild herbs and plants drying in the living room, right next to Jenison’s weaving loom. “We do a lot of witchy stuff around here,” she laughs.
Crafts of all kinds, though, are the order of the day; whenever she’s out scouting, Jenison looks for anything made by Comanche Pottery in Texas or Kentucky’s Berea College, and most of her loom tools are from a “Navajo shepherding adventure” she went on last summer with Alex Segreti of New Friends. “It’s for the Navajo to teach their young people how to have a sheep-based lifestyle again,” she says. “We were there doing a natural dyeing workshop, but we drove all around through the Southwest going to old trading posts and collecting stuff.”
When such treasures find their way into her display designs, they’re often accompanied by textiles she’s sourced or silkscreened. Jenison studied textile design at RISD alongside Segreti and another frequent collaborator of hers, Lauren Manoogian, focusing on screen-printing and eventually moving to Philly to run an apprentice program for the Fabric Workshop. By the time goose-chasing became her full-time job in 2005, Philly’s thrift stores and ample living quarters had worked their magic on her, as you can see quite clearly in the slideshow at right.
Luren Jenison’s Philly Top 5
1. The Philadelphia Museum of Art So obvious you forget it sometimes. All kinds of great stuff in there, from decorative arts and Shaker furniture to contemporary. Plus American landscape paintings of campfires on the plains that you see one day and stand there for 10 minutes going, “It’s so good! Why did I walk by this so many times and not realize?” Behind the museum, down by the river, there’s this little amphitheater of stone steps under the Waterworks where we drink secret wine on the summer nights. Best.
2. Chinatown That neighborhood has always been my go-to for random materials, food, massage (Ly Jen Therapy Salon), inspiration (Liao Collection), special brooms, cheap kitchen supplies, and art (319 N. 17th St. galleries, Space 1026). It’s also just a place to walk around in and remember that you’re living in a city with all different things going on everywhere all the time and how different our lives are even though we live so close. Morihata is also a cool imported Japanese design/basics store that is oddly placed just north of Chinatown; totally walkable and unexpectedly classy.
3. Wagner Free Institute of Science Besides being a free educational facility — with experts in various fields doing interesting lectures and weeknight events and semester-long classes on subjects like the history of invasive plant species in our region, or how cat genetics relate from tigers to house cats — the Wagner is also an extensive collection of natural-history specimens, from minerals and fossils to 100,000 animals that have been skinned stuffed and mounted. It’s easy to spend a day there drawing crystals or shrieking about giant insects you wish you didn’t know about.
4. Avril 50 A real French-style tabac in West Philly with European and high-end design and fashion magazines, international newspapers, great coffee and a Facebook update stream that becomes (erotic) poetry as they let you know what magazines are coming in: “Gentlewoman came,” “October is here,” “we got creem,” “we have good, monkey business,” “we have very nearly almost” “dazed and confused Frankie arrived.”
5. iGoldberg The army/navy surplus store cannot be beat for basics, inspiration, layers, and weirdness. Prices negotiable if you bring your gameface and a little nice conversation.
“I was lucky enough to sneak into a Yoshiko Wada indigo workshop with Michel Garcia, a French chemist who figured out the chemical processes that are actually going on with natural dyes so that you know what will work and what won’t. This method employs a really simple clay and gum-arabic resist that washes right out. There are homemade and store-bought bitters — and Kevin’s dehydrated orange — on the shelf above.”
“Our fridge, including my dream man — who it turns out my friend Lauren Manoogian contacted regarding some leather braiding, in earnest, and unrelated.”
“These are candlesticks from the Berea College of Craft in Kentucky, a school dedicated to mountain crafts whose students craft wares for scholarships, including the floormat in my room and our black cinder-sweep broom. In the foreground are a splatter enamelware pitcher and dish by Perrin Teal-Sullivan.”
“A loom I put together at at Alex Segreti of New Friends’s house and started weaving with the natural-dyed churro fibers we got on our trip to a Navajo shepherding conference last summer. Frowny face lamp sculpture by my friend Alex Da Corte.”
“Our coat rack and hat stash. I painted the rainbow a long time ago for a rejected display prototype.”
“We got this denim futon on Craigslist.”
“Above it is a cool rock-collection shelf that’s actually a sculpture by the artist Elizabeth Atterbury, which we got from a show at Bodega Gallery.”
“This is a box-man tapestry I think Lydia Okrent from Bodega Gallery gave to Kevin. Behind it is a 100-year-old rug I got from a gas station at the Santo Domingo Pueblo Reservation in New Mexico.”
“Kevin and I are really into string figures (like cat’s cradle, but that’s amateur hour). Kevin has gotten really into the mathematics of it, whereas I’m more into the anthropological side. A book I would obviously recommend is the one on the table, String Figures and How to Make Them, by Caroline Furness Jayne. We’ve also been playing a lot of dice.”
“A Pia Howell c-print and our bench bookshelves.”
“This is a picture of my sister Natalie and I. Why she’s wearing an eyepatch I do not know, but note the crotch shot, crimped hair side-pony, and aggro Donald Duck face.”
“Kevin and I have accumulated a large ball collection for some reason. The stripey ones are from Argentina, and I actually had to scour the country for the one on the right last time I was there, because I had so many regrets about not buying it the last time I’d visited. Hardware stores.”
“This is the broom from Berea College of Craft, which is designed for sweeping cinders. The lamp that’s reflected in the mirror on the right is an amalgamation of bits I made, including a piece of a Jesse Greenburg sculpture with glittery tentacles. Kevin hates it. We don’t have a better option yet, though… The marbled ceramic dish is by the Comanche Pottery Co. of Comanche, Texas, which I source from flea markets.”
“This is a mobile I made a few years ago, with some materials from Metalifferous in New York and some things I found or constructed, including a glass crystal I made when I was experimenting with glass-casting with my dad in Texas (hanging next to the blue drop).”
“Our house, looking back. The print in the foreground is by our friend from RISD, Jonathan Mosca, who had the rest of his work from college stolen on the sidewalk while he was moving one day. One of the few remaining pieces is this print of a beer can.”
“I made this leather and plastic straw-bead tapestry for a teepee Halloween costume a few years ago. Above it is a wrench my great-grandfather blacksmithed, which I almost lost to the TSA in Des Moines.”
“My bedroom, with prints by Weird Friends and another Pia Howell C-print called ‘Blue Boobs’ that I bought from Bodega. Under the bench are more examples of Comanche pottery.”
“I have way too much jewelry. I’m also obsessed with Hinoki perfume from Comme des Garcons.”
“A witchy little window into my bedroom, containing art by my sister Claire, a bowl full of essential oils, a fake geode I made with my friend Jamie Dillon a long time ago out of Plexiglas and concrete, and a bundle of horsehair used to make mascara wands which I lifted from a brush factory near my friend’s studio. Plus more marbled Comanche pots.”
“I spent a year or so collecting these Spanish wrapped wine bottles, until I realized I had enough. For some reason they kept turning up at thrift stores in north Philly.”
A portrait of Jenison and McGuinness. “This is our shared studio upstairs. We move everything around to accomodate whatever we’re up to, whether its the speakeasy, giant dinner parties, office work, meetings, or sewing giant tablecloths for an event.”
“These chairs were thrift finds from Germantown, PA, that my friend picked up after I’d looked at them the week before. I then acquired them when she moved out of Philly. They were meant to be mine. More balls for Kevin to juggle.”
“Kevin collections.”
“I got this cactus from a lady who was buying a knitting machine off Craigslist from my old roommate, and didn’t want to drive across the country with cacti and dogs in her car. I wrapped it in a towel and hugged it into the house.”
“Kevin was doing lots of online chess, and I realized we didn’t have a legit board in the house, so I bought him this really basic one for Christmas. Behind it are his plants.”
“In Kevin’s room is a painting by our friend Colt Hausmann, which Kevin traded for helping him move out of his Philly apartment and back to New York.”
“This is Kevin’s boombox, which used to be our only stereo as it’s outfitted for an auxiliary cable instead of tapes now. Also a bacon bag Kevin got at a flea market when we were in Tesuque, New Mexico.”
“Our friend John, who’s a retired architect, owns the house and makes stained glass on the third floor. This is his studio. He’s been working on it so much since this photo shoot, and now it has a super finished floor like the rest of the house! He’s the best, basically letting us have run of the place for a nominal amount of money. I love this shot!”
“One of a few of John’s installations around the house.”
Back in 2009, Kelly Rakowski was a graphic designer at Todd Oldham in New York, and Alex Segreti was living in Philadelphia, working in the textiles department at Urban Outfitters. In her free time, Rakowski ran a blog called Nothing is New, for which she scoured image archives on the web, unearthing old exhibition catalogs, classic spreads from magazines like Domus, and vintage ceramics and textiles. Segreti had a blog as well, called Weird Friends, where she documented similar obsessions: craft, pattern, art, ceramics, textiles, and dogs. The two had never met, but when Rakowski emailed Segreti on a whim one day to tell her how much she liked her site, they began to bond; when both expressed a desire to learn how to weave by hand, they decided to embark on an experiment. They shipped each other yarn, so they’d have the same palette to work from, and a few months later Rakowski made the trip to Philly. They had dinner, retired to Segreti’s apartment, and showed each other their weavings. “They kind of looked the same,” Rakowski remembers. “It was crazy. Now we always come up with the idea together but work separately, and when we meet, we forget who did what because everything magically works.” The two eventually made their design partnership official, merging the names of their online identities into a fitting moniker: New Friends.
As I walked the Tendence gift fair in Frankfurt this summer, Iris Maschek appeared to me like an oasis of glam in a desert of practicality. There she was, surrounded by clocks and soaps and clever ceramic jugs with customizable chalkboard labels, dressed all in black and perched in a cool mid-century rattan chair against this gorgeously baroque Rorschach-like backdrop: A specimen from her very first wallpaper collection.
Los Angeles designer Tanya Aguiñiga already had two studios when she took up a third this summer: the first in the backyard of the Atwater Village bungalow she shares with her husband and two sisters, and the second six blocks away, in a converted industrial-park-turned-artists’-community near the train tracks. But in early July, Aguiñiga picked up and moved her shop 2,000 miles south to the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, for a five-week residency — the first in a project she calls Artists Helping Artisans. “I had gone to Oaxaca and Chiapas in 2007, and there was so much amazing stuff being produced by the women there,” she says. “People aren’t aware of it because the skills aren’t being passed down anymore and because people are scared to travel within Mexico. There’s isn’t enough tourism or income to sustain these crafts.”
