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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Jonah Takagi glass brut vessels
09.05.19

The Making of

In a New Collection, Jonah Takagi Reimagines French Brutalism in Shimmering, Colored Glass

Jonah Takagi has always been inspired by architecture. His first foray into the design world, nearly a decade ago, included furniture inspired by Tinkertoys, and an early series of tables for Matter employed architectural elements in miniature, like I-beams, columns, and trusses. “My dad’s an architect, and it was something I considered pursuing,” Takagi says. “Now I make things that go inside buildings.” It makes sense, then, that Takagi’s latest collection — a series of stepped, angular glass vessels in deeply saturated or disco iridescent hues — would be inspired by one of architecture’s most recognizable structures: Le Corbusier’s Brutalist 1952 Unité d’Habitation housing complex in Marseilles, France.
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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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10.07.20

Q+A

Peek Into The Private Library Of Instagram’s Coolest Book Dealer

Press SF is interested in a refined but never rarefied melange of burgeoning artist’s movements and localized design, the kitschy and the iconoclastic, sourced from library sales and small secondhand bookstores with “a lot of different buyers and a lot of different viewpoints.”
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10.06.20

Q+A

DS & Durga Set Themselves Apart By Appealing to More Than Just Our Sense of Smell

"Perfume is armchair travel." This year, as we find ourselves collectively and forcibly grounded, DS & Durga’s tagline has taken on a new significance: Fragrance’s transporting ability, whether it be to carry us back in time to a familiar place or offer a portal to a destination we’ve never experienced, is more powerful and desirable than ever.
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10.05.20

Q+A

The Fantastical Fungi (And Other Subjects) of Phyllis Ma’s Supernatural Still Lifes

Photographer and animator Phyllis Ma’s work is centered around what she calls “special nothings:” ordinary objects that, in the right context, can appear “magical, surreal, or even uncanny.” Fuzzy flowers nuzzling each other, a block of aspic the exact dimensions of an iPhone, a phallic gherkin covered in warty bumps — all resplendent in hyper-stylized settings and hyper-saturated hues. Recently, Ma — who was born in China and immigrated to Brooklyn when she was eight — turned her lens on the mushroom kingdom.
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10.05.20

Sight Unseen Presents

Guest Editor Fiorella Valdesolo on Mushrooms and the Interconnectedness of All Things

Today, meet Fiorella Valdesolo, a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and consultant who is probably best known for her role as co-founder and editor-in-chief of the food magazine Gather Journal (whose erstwhile print issues we still hoard). All of the stories we’ll be posting between now and Friday have been either written or chosen by Fiorella; they center around the interconnectedness of all things — and, in a way, why we need each other now more than ever.
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10.03.20

Saturday Selects

Week of September 28, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: LRNCE makes her first lamps, a New York designer releases a Memphis-style mirror to rival the Ultrafragola, and India Mahdavi opens a project space for experimental installations like the one pictured above.
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10.02.20

Up and Coming

6 Up-and-Coming Chinese Designers to Watch

A trinity of qualities anoints China as one to watch in the independent design landscape: a raft of regional, incubating talent; prodigious market demand; and design and production innovation. We recently spoke with six talents from the rising creative class to get an accurate read on a burgeoning design scene in China — which is increasingly showing itself to be not only uniquely Chinese but also distinctly of-the-moment.
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