08.22.16

Excerpt: Book

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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08.20.16

Saturday Selects

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
08.18.16

Sighted

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
08.16.16

At Home With

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
08.15.16

Graphic Design

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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07.08.15

Up and Coming

London Accessories Designer Ejing Zhang

Growing up in China, designer Ejing Zhang was fascinated by traditional calligraphy and ink painting — art forms that are both fine and expressive, requiring a fluid interaction with brush and ink. Zhang is now based in London, but at the heart of her work is the same sensitivity to materials that she observed growing up. Four years ago, while studying at the Royal College of Art, she developed a new technique for creating work that involved taking spalted beech wood (partially decayed wood that has a marble-like pattern), wrapping it with colored thread, and casting it in resin, before sanding and polishing it to reveal its beautiful cross-sections.
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08.13.16

Saturday Selects

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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08.12.16

Sighted

A Darkly Cinematic Furniture Collection, Rooted in Retrofuturism

Use Your Illusions is the third collection we've featured by the Sydney-based design studio Page Thirty Three, but it's the most cohesive by far, inspired by nostalgic visions of the future but rooted in the here and now and the studio's interest in ritual. "I love looking at how the future was forecast 50 years ago, and comparing it to how we live today," explains co-founder and creative director Ryan Hanrahan. "In most cases I like the alternate space-age visions that I saw on the big screen — or dreamt up as a kid — much more. I think a lot of what we design comes from these childhood obsessions."
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08.11.16

Shopping

A Day’s Worth of Designy Studio Essentials From Need Supply’s New Housewares Arm

Need Supply has always been one of the first places we look when we're in the market for affordable yet fashion-y basics. But this month, the online retailer officially launched Need Supply Life, its permanent home for designs for the home. After taking a spin through the site, we realized that its wares would be equally suited to the studio, so we put together a game plan for upgrading your typical workday with gear sourced from the new site — not to mention some of our favorite makers.
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Stylish Oversized Planters and Where to Find Them
08.10.16

Shopping

Finally — 20 Oversized Planters Worthy of Your Fiddle Leaf

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that no effortlessly chic interior these days is complete without an indoor tree (or at least a split-leaf philodendron). So why is it so darn hard to find the stylish oversized planters you need to put them in? Nearly every ceramicist we know makes tiny planters for succulents or small-scale ones for your basic snake plant or fern. But those 10-inch or more ones are fewer and farther between. Never fear: We did the legwork for you to find 20 stylish oversized planters that'll make your home or studio sing.
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08.09.16

Sighted

Five New Styling Pieces From a Favorite Brooklyn Housewares Brand

We once described the small-goods Brooklyn brand Areaware as straddling the line between Jeff Koons and Dieter Rams — which in practice meant that for every gold-foiled pig or pug-printed pillow, there was a hydroformed stainless steel flask, or a bottle opener with a built-in magnet. Their new fall collection falls along that same continuum, with carefully considered items that telegraph a sense of fun through either a color palette or an extremely clever concept.
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08.07.16

Saturday Selects

Week of August 1, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Uncovering goodies at The Line in Amagansett, coveting a collab between two of ceramics' hottest stars, and ogling a beautiful series of glass sculptures inspired by the architecture of a Pizza Hut.
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