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11.12.18

Up and Coming

Meet Agnes, the Next Big Thing from Central America

Imagine taking a landscape and a civilization and devising an alternative evolutionary path for it — and then creating a collection of furniture based upon that surrogate world. In a nutshell, that's how Guatemala City–based studio Agnes created their newest collection. Designers Estefanía de Ros and Gustavo Quintana spent two years researching pre-Columbian craftsmanship to create the kind of aesthetic that might have emerged had Mayan culture evolved with a bit less Western interference.
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Dutch Design Week 2018 Raw Color
10.30.18

Fair Report

35 Designers We Loved at Dutch Design Week 2018

The theme for Dutch Design Week 2018 was “If not us, then who?" — which says a lot about the current state of affairs in the world but also about the progressive and responsible spirit that lies at the core of the Dutch design scene. Here are some of our favorite finds from across the city.
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10.04.18

Up and Coming

Meet Elisa Ossino, the Milan-Based Designer and Stylist Who’s Suddenly Everywhere

This will come as a shock to no one, but the Milan design scene can be a little insular. Some of the best things don’t make it past the border, or even beyond the chic artery of Via Solferino for that matter. And unless you speak a bit of Italian and are ordering the right magazines from abroad, it’s not always apparent who’s making waves in the city. Take, for example, up and coming Italian designer Elisa Ossino, an architect and stylist who, after more than a decade of working diligently within the Milan design scene, is finally charting international waters.
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09.17.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

LDF Preview: The Online Design Gallery Redefining “Nordic”

For Now Nordic, Adorno invited curators from Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Reykjavik and Oslo to assemble a collection from 5-7 designers working at the intersection of art, design, and craft. The point of the exhibition was to explore whether the label "Nordic" — or what the organizers call "design-world shorthand" for clean lines, natural materials, simplicity and functionality — can meaningfully describe an aesthetic or if lumping designs from different countries together actually does each of them a disservice.
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09.13.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

14 Up-and-Coming American Designers, In a Show Curated By One of Their Own

As people whose job it is to track emerging designers — particularly those on the American scene — it's rare that we walk into a show to find incredible work by a roster of relative unknowns. And yet that's exactly what happened when I rolled up to Fernando Mastrangelo's studio in deep (deep) Brooklyn last Friday night for the opening party of In Good Company: Material Culture. It's the second exhibition Mastrangelo has curated in his space — this time alongside Architectural Digest's senior design writer Hannah Martin.
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08.03.18

Up and Coming

This Modular Furniture Collection Might Unglue You From Your Phone

Kusheda Mensah is a British-born Ghanaian designer, based in London, whose Modular by Mensah Mutual collection began from the realization that face-to-face interaction is deteriorating from the rise of social media. As an "artistic remedy," Mensah developed 20 interlocking modular pieces of furniture, representing the closeness and connection shared between humans, as well as the human form itself.
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06.27.18

Up and Coming

In Her Debut Collection, Sarah Ellison Channels the ’70s Through a Distinctly Australian Lens

Armed with years of research, Australian stylist and designer Sarah Ellison debuted her first collection of furniture late last year, inspired by the playful proportions of '70s. In her pieces, these references are reinterpreted through a distinctly Australian lens, with colors and textures from the coastline captured through material choices such as travertine, mirrored glass, ceramic, and linen.
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06.08.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

At the Reform Design Biennale, Helping to Push Design in a More Radical Direction

Last summer, we received an invitation from Danish designer Maria Bruun to participate in the Reform Design Biennale, an open-call, juried design exhibition she co-founded in 2014 with her friends and colleagues, Louise Hagemenn, Rasmus Fox, and Jens Dan Johansen. The brief for designers? To create an experimental piece that might challenge their typical practice or usual methods of production — i.e., what the curators describe as doing "the illogical in order to create something logical." The results are on view starting tomorrow at Munkeruphus, just outside of Copenhagen.
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05.29.18

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

28 Designers to Know From This Year’s Sight Unseen OFFSITE

In this year’s edition of OFFSITE Selects, the works on view were international in scope and wildly varying in scale, from a chubby-legged, rusty velvet chaise by newcomer Jessica Herrera of Oôd Studio to six tiny marble vessels by Chile’s Rodrigo Bravo (both got quickly scooped up by gallerists or other in-the-know design people).
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SAIC x Sight Unseen OFFSITE
05.23.18

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Five Talents to Watch from SAIC’s Ceramics Exhibition at Sight Unseen OFFSITE

This year, two recently famous American designers themselves — Pete Oyler of Assembly Design and Jonah Takagi of Atelier Takagi — launched an intensive studio class in the SAIC Designed Objects program, aimed at taking students on a holistic journey from concept to exhibition, with the ultimate goal being a showcase of ceramic drinkware; the results were on view at this weekend’s Sight Unseen OFFSITE.
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05.10.18

Shopping

We Re-Curated Brooklyn’s A/D/O Shop — Here Are 5 Great Things You Can Buy There

We've run an online shop for almost as long as we've run Sight Unseen, yet if we had a dime for every time we've heard the same question over the past 9 years — why don't you open a physical store? — we'd be very, very rich. To all those who have so kindly indulged in a fantasy of shopping Sight Unseen IRL, however, we have big news for you: As of today, we've taken over the curation of the shop at A/D/O in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and filled it with super-affordable furniture, lighting, and housewares by dozens of Sight Unseen-approved brands and designers.
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