10.22.20

Up and Coming

This Swiss Designer’s Unfussy Furniture is Inspired By the Sunshine of His New Spanish Home

When Antonius Dreier moved from Switzerland to Madrid just over a year ago, the light and lifestyle in the Spanish city inspired a debut furniture collection from Studio Drei that’s most at home in the spots where the sunshine spills inside. “I think the move has had a great impact on my pieces,” he says. “The culture of this country and its craftwork are very present in my first catalogue.”
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Simone Bodmer-Turner ceramics
10.20.20

Studio Visit

Simone Bodmer-Turner’s New Brooklyn Studio is Like a Ceramic Sculpture Come to Life

Simone Bodmer-Turner's most recent project, a build-out of her Brooklyn studio, explodes the scale of her ceramic forms. Taking over the doorway and an entire wall adjacent to the former factory’s bright loft windows, she installed a bench, desk, and shelving in textured white gypsum — what she describes as an homage to the Mediterranean-influenced organic architects that have shaped her ceramics practice thus far.
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10.17.20

Saturday Selects

Week of October 12, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a VitraHaus redesign with optimal daydreaming in mind, a more modern take on marble, and the IRL opening of EDIT Napoli.
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10.16.20

Excerpt: Book

This Vintage Mid-Century Primer Provides the Blueprint From Which Contemporary Design Emerged

In her encyclopedic 1996 book Fifties Furniture, author Leslie Piña outlines the five styles that influenced the midcentury era: Art Deco, Bauhaus and the International Style, Machine Age Modern, Biomorphism, and Abstract Expressionism. The result, say Jared Blake and Ed Be of Lichen NYC, who chose the book as the last subject of their guest editor week, is something like "basic algebra." Fifties furniture, explains Be, is "a blueprint for a lot of the furniture that we’ve seen in the past twenty or thirty years in America.”
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10.15.20

Q+A

A Plywood Pioneer and Champion of Eco-Modern Design Whose Work is Ripe for Rediscovery

Even though two of Peter Danko’s chair designs are in MoMA's permanent collection, many of his works were never all that commercially successful, leading him to view himself as something of an underdog. But the first time we discovered Danko's 1980 Bodyform chair on one of our early sourcing excursions, there was no question of whether to snap it up. Both it and and many of Danko's other designs are pieces of art and sculpture, and are ripe to be rediscovered by a generation that truly values those qualities.
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10.14.20

Up and Coming

Designer Mac Collins Mines His Family History To Imagine Brighter Black Futures

Mac Collins's Iklwa series debuted at London Craft Week this month, produced by legacy manufacturer Benchmark. Comprising two lounge chairs — one large and one small — and a side table, the collection is named for a style of short spear used by the Zulu, the chair featuring armrests that echo its shape. It's a compelling introduction to the 25-year-old's distinct yet disruptive approach, informed by his Jamaican heritage as well as his background in art and sculpture.
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10.13.20

Q+A

James Evans’s Photorealistic Paintings Are a Meditation on Impermanence

The suffocated images of artist James Evans’ “Constraint Equation” series are a photorealistic depiction of what appears to be houseplants wrapped up in sheets of humid plastic that obscure and abstract them. Created during a period in quarantine, they are a fitting expression of the limitations and discomfort most of us have experienced this year. Evans, who grew up in Colorado and now splits his time between New York and Mexico City, is a prodigious new force in the art world.
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10.12.20

Sight Unseen Presents

From Their Artfully Curated Brooklyn Design Shop, Guest Editors Lichen NYC Are Helping to Democratize Design

By definition, “lichen” is a moss composed of two or sometimes many organisms operating in a symbiotic relationship with one another. In 2017, we opened the doors to Lichen NYC, our take on accessible furniture — both vintage and contemporary — settled harmoniously into a single space, with an aim to represent that spirit of symbiosis and inclusion in the design community. Our goal, in first one store, and now another, is to push design forward by empowering individuals with knowledge of past designs and helping them make sense of how to incorporate those pieces into current living scenarios
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10.10.20

Saturday Selects

Week of October 5, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Robert McKinley's new Montauk vacation rental — which isn't necessarily "casual" as advertised, but is extremely chic nonetheless — a bevy of IRL exhibitions in London and Milan, and an explosion of florals in Copenhagen.
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10.09.20

Sighted

Inside Creative Growth, the Always Inspiring Oakland-Based Incubator For Artists With Disabilities

While the work of Creative Growth artists has hung in the MoMA and Brooklyn Museum, has been emblazoned on designer accessories by Marc Jacobs, has been commissioned by Facebook, and has been scooped up by everyone from celebrities to the most prestigious galleries and dealers, there are still many people who are happening upon it for the first time. Here, 10 artists on the current Creative Growth roster whose work we find especially compelling.
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10.08.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

Duro Olowu’s Mind-Expanding Chicago Exhibition Crosses Time, Place, Gender, and Race

Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, the highly anticipated exhibition curated by the Nigerian-born British designer, was up for only two weeks at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago before the pandemic shutdown of last March. But when the MCA re-opened, it thankfully extended the show's run into early fall. Walking through the rooms — teeming with over 300 works Olowu selected from the city’s public and private art collections — was a bit like scrolling through a really engaging, unpredictable Instagram account, but without the glazed exhaustion and listlessness that comes from being so online. Or the frustration of being on the outside looking in. This was a show that welcomed you.
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