“I have a thing for school supplies, but what I love most about old erasers is the typography. It’s actually what I love most about a lot of the things that I collect. I also love the shades of pink and how some are really worn and some are pristine. Erasers this old aren’t really usable anymore anyway, so I feel like I’m rescuing something that would otherwise be thrown away. I have been collecting erasers for years and have a place in San Francisco where I find them fairly easily, but I don’t want to reveal my source. This was the first collection I posted for my project back in January.”
03.10.10

8 Things

Lisa Congdon’s “A Collection a Day”

On January 1, the San Francisco–based artist and illustrator Lisa Congdon began documenting her various collections on a new blog, A Collection a Day. A new day, a new grouping: vintage Boy Scout cards, delicate sewing notions, paint tubes, plastic charms, erasers, paintbrushes, pencil leads, even — strangely — multicolored buoys. “No, I don’t have a collection of buoys,” Congdon laughs. Or a collection of Victorian shoes, for that matter. As her website explains, while she photographs the collections that decorate her house and studio, "some are imagined; those I will draw or occasionally paint.” Scroll through her site, and you’ll find twigs and toiletries drawn with ink on paper, and, yes, buoys painted with gouache on Masonite.
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Julie Ho and Nick Andersen in their Manhattan studio, which they share with the graphic designer Alex Lin. On the fourth floor is New York's only veterinary dermatologist, which is "why you see all the weird-looking dogs in the lobby," they joke. Behind them is one of their large party garlands, a design they originally developed for their very first project, the Spring '09 United Bamboo fashion show and lookbook.
03.08.10

Studio Visit

Confetti System, Decoration Designers

Between the two of them, Julie Ho and Nicholas Andersen had designed clothing, jewelry, movie sets, music videos, and Martha Stewart shoots, plus dabbled in painting, drawing, pattern-making, sewing, and crocheting before teaming up creatively in 2008. Ho had even been a studio assistant for Tom Sachs, making foam Hello Kittys with a medical scalpel (and slicing open her hands almost weekly in the process). So it took a particular kind of alchemy for the pair to decide that — out of all their talents and interests — they would devote their days to making paper party decorations, the kind you'd expect to find in a dollar store.
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In a room with a bright orange Verner Panton chair and a $10,000 couch by Jaime Hayon — not to mention incredible moldings — Nora Rabins’s found theater seat with massive steel wings (a wing chair, get it?) steals the show. “We love her work because it’s so interactive, and she changes the way you would normally use things,” says Stokowski of the Providence, Rhode Island–based RISD grad. “The wings literally fold up around you. Everyone wants to sit in it.”
03.05.10

What They Bought

Fair Folks & a Goat

At Fair Folks & a Goat, a new retail gallery and tea salon hybrid on New York’s Upper East Side, everything inside the gracious late 19th-century studio apartment is for sale. Well, almost everything — a small candy dish that reads “When I count my blessings, I count you twice” was a gift from co-owner Anthony Mazzei’s mother and “it’s a million dollars,” he jokes, while the vintage paperbacks lining a wall of shelves constitute an actual lending library. Here, the props and merch blend into a seamless backdrop for a new kind of social gathering. “We wanted to create a space for young people to have a home away from home, where instead of alcohol and loud music it would be more like a physical incarnation of a magazine, with design, art, fashion, and culture,” says Mazzei.
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Rodrigo Almeida's new collection — built by hand in his São Paulo studio — includes the Concreta chair shown here. It's made from wood and rope, with sparkly plastic cushions. Color is a huge element of Almeida's work. "When I walk in Brazil, the greens are so strong, sky is so blue — it’s different," he says. "I lived for a few years in the U.S., and while the flowers are more beautiful, the green is more like gray. So you get a spot of color, but not blocks of color like in Brazil. These are the kinds of things you internalize as a designer."
03.03.10

Up and Coming

Rodrigo Almeida, Furniture Designer

To any reader who went to design school and is, years later, still making student loan payments month after month, you might want to close your eyes for this one: Rodrigo Almeida — the 34-year-old Brazilian furniture designer who's pals with the Campana brothers, has been featured in Wallpaper, and has made pieces for top galleries like Contrasts and FAT — didn't go to university, not even as an undergrad. What you're looking at here is raw talent, and a career that began when Almeida simply picked up the Brazilian magazine Arc Design six years ago and thought, "I want to do that."
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The first part of the magazine introduced the tourists and residents populating Vörland, as well as the strange devices and rituals they had come up with to deal with the searing heat. This young girl wears a special full-body swimsuit, hand-stitched by Fabrica's fashion team, designed to block out the sun.
03.01.10

The Making of

Welcome to Vörland, by Reed Young

Reed Young’s photography career has taken him from a sumo wrestler’s home in Tokyo to the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic to the halls of Fabrica, the Benetton-owned creative lab for young talent in Treviso, Italy. But he probably wouldn’t have gotten to any of those places if he hadn’t faked his way into art school. At 17 and a middling student at a Minneapolis senior high, Young, now 27, borrowed a photography portfolio from a friend and was accepted into his hometown’s prestigious Perpich Center for Arts Education on its merits. “When I arrived, I think they found it a bit strange that I didn’t know the difference between an aperture and a shutter speed,” he says.
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Williams's cat Cloud, whom his 10-year-old daughter Piper was responsible for naming. "People love that cat, man," he says. It sits atop the dining room table, a 13-foot-long number by German brand e15, whose work reappears several times throughout the house. "I really admire their design sense."
02.26.10

At Home With

JP Williams, Graphic Designer and Archivist

Someone like JP Williams has enjoyed plenty of validating moments in his 20-year career as a graphic designer: Getting to study under one of his design heros, Paul Rand, at Yale; winning more than 100 awards for projects like his kraft-paper tea packages for Takashimaya; discovering that his collection of baseball cards from 1909 was worth enough to buy his wife and business partner Allison an engagement ring. All well and good, however none of it really compared, he admits, to the feeling of being validated by Martha Stewart.
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A typical vignette in the Scholten & Baijings studio includes graphic tests and models for their latest furniture collection, plus strange ephermera like a tiny silver spray bottle that contains a distilled spirit for perfuming almost anything edible.
02.24.10

Studio Visit

Scholten & Baijings, Product Designers

The story of Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings began, like many Dutch stories do, in a church. In the late ’90s, Baijings was working for an agency whose headquarters were located inside one of the country’s many abandoned houses of worship. Scholten, a graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven, had a burgeoning design practice nearby. Scholten was asked to design a small bar for the agency’s office, and “the rest is history,” says Baijings.
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02.23.10

Sighted

Justine Reyes, Photographer

Sighted today on The Morning News: Taking inspiration from Dutch vanitas paintings, photographer Justine Reyes’s latest series “Vanitas” creates still lifes from contemporary objects, getting the composition, textures, and colors so precisely “right,” it’s a wonder we’re not seeing some 17th-century Flemish take on contemporary life.
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Inspiration behind your photography: Beauty and photographers better than me, who trigger constant renewal and prevent stagnation. Photo (c) Kimm Whiskie
02.19.10

Up and Coming

Kimm Whiskie, photographer

There’s something charmingly mysterious about the 24-year-old Lithuanian photographer Kimm Whiskie. The name alone sounds like an alias (turns out the second half actually is — Whiskie did time in a rock-and-roll band) and its gender is ambiguous (an embarrassed email straightens this out). A request for an interview is politely downgraded to a Skype chat; when a portrait arrives, it’s a grainy Lomo shot of the photographer lying face down on the pavement.
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On a recent trip to Vienna, Otten quickly noticed a difference in the local custom — Austrian women weren't afraid to wear fur in public like their retribution–fearing Dutch counterparts. After she complimented an older lady on her coat in a cafe, the woman told her a tale about just how many furs any well-to-do Viennese woman will acquire in a lifetime: one upon graduation, one at her wedding, one later in adulthood, and if she's still alive after her husband dies, a final coat as a gift to herself. The story inspired Otten to do this series. "Most of them don’t even know I've taken their picture, because as a street photographer you can’t ask everyone," she says. "Sometimes you just shoot."
02.16.10

The Making of

Urban Daily Life by Reineke Otten

When Reineke Otten visits a new city, it feels a bit like looking at Richard Scarry’s children’s books, their pages crammed with the minutiae of daily life. As a “streetologist,” her job is to scrutinize the often mundane details of places like Paris or Dubai, photographing dozens of window shades, doorbells, and flea market stalls until she’s put together a revealing portrait of the local culture. Though most of Otten’s clients pay her for her sleuthing skills, her new website Urban Daily Life offers the rest of us a glimpse into what it's like to see the world through a magnifying glass.
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"At the end of the 1950s, both Marlene Schnelle and Ingeborg Kracht, who later became Dieter Rams wife, worked as photographers at Braun. Photography played a significant part in corporate communications."
02.12.10

Excerpt: Book

Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

The products featured in Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams will be familiar to any Rams disciple, but what struck us most about the book was a section devoted to Braun’s beautifully understated communication design and to that department’s fearless leader, Wolfgang Schmittel. He ran a tight ship — an in-house manual went out to each member of the design team with instructions on how to appropriately and inappropriately market the Braun product line — but as a result, the Braun image “differed greatly from the existing design forms of other manufacturers at the time, due to its clarity."
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"Abstract thought is a warm puppy" —Art Spiegelman: "There's a theory in art that good things come from your stomach and aren't thought about, and I disagree with that exclusion of thinking and of the senses. I like that Spiegelman doesn't exclude it. I used this quote as the name of a 2008 installation I made at the Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art in Brussels."
02.09.10

8 Things

Esther Stocker, Artist

It's funny to hear Esther Stocker talk about reading between the lines. The Vienna-based painter is known for manipulating spatial geometry using the framework of the grid — both on canvas and in her trippy 3-D installations — until the mind starts making linear connections that aren't really there, trying to find order in the optically illusive chaos. But that's not what Stocker's referring to. She's talking about Charles Schultz's Peanuts.
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