This week we announced our 11th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the last group of Hot List designers here (including Zoe Mowat, whose Isle light for Lambert & Fils is pictured above).

Shaina Tabak

New York, shainatabak.com
Woodworkers in Brooklyn — especially those who graduated from RISD — are a dime a dozen these days, but almost no one is approaching the craft with the kind of obsessive, experimental bent of Shaina Tabak. Mixing old-school artistry (marquetry, inlay) with digital milling techniques, Tabak’s works are immediately appealing in their look and feel but also dizzying, as you stare at them a bit longer, wondering how exactly they came to be and why she makes it look so easy. In one, a CNC-milled strip of wood takes on the appearance of a flattened plaid carpet runner; in another, a coffee table resembles a terracotta sponge but is in fact made from gouged Sapele wood (and draped with a carved wood fish carcass for good measure). Tabak recently wrapped up a solo exhibition at Superhouse gallery that catapulted her onto everyone’s watch list — and landed her firmly on this list. 

What is American design to you, and what excites you about it?

I’m drawn to makers who digest the world around them through craft and form, more like a sculptor than anything. The main reason I chose to study furniture design in undergrad was the realization that people were using the furniture form to rebel against established ideals of craft, interior hierarchies, and conceptual approaches to function. The American design or object making that I’m interested in embodies this type of spirit and approach.

What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?

I will be building on my sculpture practice and exploring my attachment to utility. After a year of laser focus on the body of work from my solo show in September, I’m beginning to intentionally explore and research again, externally and internally, while building on the ideas and questions that my last body of work sparked. I will be teaching CNC workshops at Pratt for the first time. I’m looking forward to everything I will learn in the process of teaching. I’ve gone to The Met every weekend since my show closed, so a lot more of that in the new year too.

What inspires or informs your work in general? 

I’m interested in flattening, readjusting perspectives, material associations. Even though my work is heavily informed by technology, I look for inspiration from ancient and historical techniques. Lately I’ve been going back to the intarsia inlaid walls of the Ducal Palace study, a small room in The Met. Scenes are depicted from floor to ceiling in the linear perspective, creating illusions of depth throughout the space.

Sunfish

New York, sunfish.nyc
Julia Eshaghpour and Kevin Hollidge had worked together for more than a decade in a fine art practice called Tenet before they founded their furniture studio Sunfish in 2021 — and before we discovered that studio through an exhibition design they created for Sophie Lou Jacobsen this past spring. Whereas Tenet explores the fake materials often used in architecture and interiors, like marble-pattern laminates, Sunfish is all about craftsmanship and material integrity, from painted-wood folding screens to cast-bronze chairs.

What is American design to you, and what excites you about it?

Someone once described to us that the greatest culture shock of coming to America from abroad was going to an American grocery store. With an abundance of products to choose from, one product in twenty different permutations, and all of them distinguished through packaging, advertising, boasts of health benefits, historic record, or technological innovation, brands in America are tasked with re-inventing a familiar good again and again. To a consumer, these choices can be overwhelming, but to a creator they’re exhilarating.

American design falls into this tradition of insistence that something from the past can always be invented anew, with the right flourish, technique, and perhaps most importantly, narrative context. What we’ve gained from a culture of heavy consumerism is a firm belief in the power of narrative. As a young country, not tied so strongly to ancient craft traditions or a singular, unifying aesthetic, American design has become very skilled at inventing context. Some of the best American designers are remembered not for one famous chair or material employed, but for the world they invited people into. This world-building is something American designers are pre-disposed to do — it’s ingrained in our culture, from all the brands you see at the supermarket to all the movies that come out of Hollywood. Creating a life with and through your work is very motivating and exciting to us.

What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?

Our foundations are in fine arts, and we’ve been making sculptural works as a somewhat separate practice from Sunfish. However, in our home, our furniture and artworks live together. Following in the footsteps of many architecturally minded sculptors, we have plans to bridge these practices more fully, presenting artworks and furniture pieces together that are researched from the same place.

What inspires or informs your work in general?

Our studio is informed by historical examples of modernism, whether it be a material or wood joinery, something that’s clear and concise and makes sense to us. But also, beyond specific furniture pieces, we’re inspired by the focus on details that artists embed in their home, whether it be painting a window a color, laying out a kitchen in an unusual way, displaying an eclectic array of collected housewares or craft objects, building in nature in ways that would ordinarily be seen as inhospitable, or a vernacular object with personal history to it. It’s been deeply formative to us to visit historical homes of makers across disciplines to see how they lived and produced objects for their own environment, and to see how those objects might interact with a world outside of their own production.

Wentrcek Zebulon

New York, wentrcekzebulon.com
Back in 2016, when they last appeared on our Hot List, they were called Wintercheck Factory, and had twice shown at our Offsite shows their sophisticated, at times Judd-like furniture made from utilitarian industrial materials. These days Kristin Wentrecek and Andrew Zebulon simply go by Wentrcek Zebulon, but their interest in elevating the unglamorous hasn’t flagged a bit, as evidenced by their solo show this year at Marta gallery in L.A., where they transformed cardboard-colored coated foam into furniture that was as intriguing to see as it was to touch.

What is American design to you, and what excites you about it?

American design means being intuitive, and being too stubborn or dumb to know that something won’t work, or that it isn’t supposed to. That feels distinctly American — not listening when someone says it can’t be done. As a result, the road from the idea to the end result is generally pretty rocky, but we (usually) arrive at a place that’s probably better or more interesting than where we thought we were going to end up anyway. It’s unpredictable, and that’s exciting.

What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?

For 2024, we’re focusing on:
• Working in fiberglass. We’d like to produce a small set of fabricated fiberglass pieces, using this chair we showed in the spring as a jumping-off point.
• Producing a new collection of sculptural lighting works. The light experiments we included in our recent show at Marta, No Life, got us really interested in the possibilities of work focused on lighting.
• Trying out new ways of making and distributing our work. That means working faster, experimenting more, and creating more unique, one-of-one pieces.
• Going big. We’d love to find the right partner(s) that we can work with on larger scale, more immersive environmental installations.

What inspires or informs your work in general?

Our work is inspired by: industrial rubble, concrete, trash, space travel, both Cronenbergs, bathhouses, old men commenting in dead forums online, radiation, locker rooms, Francis Bacon, old cars, new cars, sanitoriums, Larry Bell, Mark Bell, surveillance, chrome, monochrome, stainless steel, caves, bunkers, thick drapes, crime scenes, linoleum.

Zoë Mowat

New York, zoemowat.com
If you’re wondering what took us so long to name Zoë Mowat to this list, it’s because technically, she only moved to America in 2020, having been born and raised in Canada and based in Montreal. But Mowat has already made her mark on the New York scene, not least with her Isle Collection for Lambert & Fils, which was our pick for the best launch of this year’s NYCxDesign. A lighted tube that rests gently atop solid bricks of aluminum or stone, it represents everything that’s great about Mowat’s approach to design: It’s an inevitable-seeming form — that somehow no one has attempted before — made even more lovely by its juxtaposition of materials and the interplay of color. If that wasn’t enough, Mowat recently launched a new hi-fi brand called Waves and Frequencies, whose first launch has already become designer-made speaker du jour in a year teeming with similar debuts. 

What is American design to you, and what excites you about it?

I suppose as a Canadian I’ve long been an observer from the North, where much of our art and culture is so often defined in reference to the US — as a kind of mirror for what we are and what we’re not. I see the landscape as innovative, idiosyncratic, self-sufficient, and ever-changing, both in the design realm and more broadly. I feel happy to contribute to it.

What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?

This year, I’ll be shifting my design lens to the audio world with the launch of Waves and Frequencies, a new hi-fi brand I’m starting with a dear old friend. It’s been many years in the making and our first output is a customizable speaker that sounds incredible. We’ve got a PA in development and plans for music-related furniture, accessories, and event programming. I will also be releasing a new furniture series for the Japanese brand, Ariake. I recently returned from a productive workshop at their factory in Saga prefecture, Japan, where I worked directly with the craftspeople alongside a handful of international designers.

What inspires or informs your work in general? 

I spent ten days traveling through Japan solo after the workshop so I’m sure what I saw will inform what comes next. That’s often how it works: I absorb (and archive) the odd or mundane things I see on the street, or the forms I come across in a gallery or library book — a material, an architectural element, a unique connection point, for example. These small details tend to spark ideas that transform into larger ones, usually taking an entirely new shape and ultimately connecting back to life in some way.