Meet the 1980s-Era Designer Whose Chair Went Semi-Viral During the Pandemic

The impulse to reassess design from the late '70s and '80s — and to place it in a current context — has clearly been in the air, most notably at last year’s Return to Downtown group show from Superhouse and Magen H Gallery and at the more recent Blurring the Timeline show, also at Superhouse. Standout pieces from both exhibitions included chairs by a designer whose name you might not be familiar with: Howard Meister, part of the core group of designer-artists at Art et Industrie, a now-legendary New York gallery that opened in 1977 and closed in the late '90s. Here, we caught up with Meister from his home in Western Massachusetts. In a roving, entertaining interview, he shared with us how he got his largely accidental start and went from being “a dope in a suit” to an artist, his belief in the importance of craft and his desire not to be “survived by crap."
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This Exhibition Shows How Cranbrook Helped Pioneer the Cross-Disciplinary, Craft-Based, Experimental Design and Art of Today

Most people know the highlights of the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s storied 90-year history, from its campus by Eliel Saarinen to its role as a breeding ground for the stars of mid-century modernism. But in June, the school launched the results of a four-year deep-dive into its own history — in the form of a sprawling exhibition and a 600-page book, both called With Eyes Opened — that offer a much more nuanced view of Cranbrook’s game-changing influence. We spoke with curator Andrew Blauvelt about 6 artworks and objects by varied practitioners that were part of that narrative.
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EJR Barnes vintage furniture finds

EJR Barnes — Your New Favorite Instagram Follow — On His Top 10 Vintage Furniture Finds

Elsewhere on the site today, we're featuring the London designer EJR Barnes, whose work first came to our attention via his smooth, aptly named Buffalo Mozzarella chair. But we were actually first introduced to Barnes via his Instagram, where he chronicles his favorite — and often completely obscure — vintage furniture finds, from Borsani daybeds to Vignelli glassware to Kukkapuro lamps. Click through for a glimpse at Barnes's current obsessions.
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Design History: A Timeline of the Most Iconic Dining Objects of All Time

If we’re being totally honest, our idea to create a timeline of iconic dining objects for the second-ever issue of MOLD — the bi-annual journal about the future of food, which we were invited to guest-edit by our friend and colleague Linyee Yuan — didn’t initially spring from any grand pedagogic ambition to illustrate the history of design through the lens of one of humankind’s most universal rituals. It came, rather, from a chance, late-night encounter with a particularly nostalgic bit of pop culture: the Beetlejuice dinner-party scene.
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