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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04.17.20

Excerpt: Book

Three Recipes for Virtuous Comfort Food, From a Fave Restaurant of New York Creatives

Right now we're all cooking at home, and all we want is virtuous comfort food — exactly the kind of food that the New York restaurant Dimes is known for. Today we're sharing three recipes from its new book, Dimes Times, all of them warm and soothing, relatively easy to make, and freezer-friendly, too. It's no sitting-at-a-Matisse-inspired-table-sipping-wheatgrass-margaritas, but it's the perfect thing for a pandemic that has deprived us of such.

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10.15.18

At Home With

In a New York Apartment, Dimes Co-Founder Sabrina De Sousa Lives With What She Makes

Like her restaurant, Dimes, Sabrina De Sousa's impeccably appointed Chinatown apartment is filled with objects she created herself, which is why we’ve been begging her for ages to photograph it — a feat we've finally pulled off thanks to our editorial collaboration with Sonos. We've teamed up with the smart speaker brand for a new storytelling series called Creative Women at Home, in which we’ll visit the homes of four influential women and find out how they live, work, relax, and listen.

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07.21.18

Saturday Selects

Week of July 16, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: The perfect desk to match your Cesca chairs, the chicest use of Gaetano Pesce furniture we've seen, and a series of tables that mark the breakout of a new female-led Thai design studio.

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01.30.18

Excerpt: Magazine

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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06.07.17

Excerpt: Book

Tauba Auerbach on Making Art — and Salad — In a New Cookbook

There's been a glut of cookbooks lately with as much a foot in the art and design world as they do the food (see Nacho Alegre and Peter Shire's amazing photography collab in the recent Sqirl book, for starters). But perhaps no author has meshed the two worlds together as effortlessly and as completely as Julia Sherman, the artist behind the immensely popular blog Salad for President, whose cookbook of the same name was released last month and which we're excerpting here today.

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05.18.17

Sight Unseen Presents

Angela Dimayuga on How the Design of Downtown NYC’s Favorite Restaurant Came to Be

If you’ve ever been to Mission Chinese Food on New York’s Lower East Side, chances are you’ll remember the food — the legendary kung pao pastrami, or that one dish that makes even celery taste delicious. Chances are even better, though, that you’ll remember the experience, from the cocktail topped with flaky, edible Post-Its, to the epically grand piano music, to the friends you happened to bump into late on a Wednesday.

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05.17.17

Sighted

A Designer-Made Breakfast Cafe at the Venice Biennale

For the opening of the Venice Biennale last week, the city's A plus A gallery became a three-day Breakfast Pavilion — part curatorial project, part café — where art could be discussed, produced, performed and eaten. Artists hosted and conceptualized the meals, while more than two dozen designers outfitted the space with furniture and objects.

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05.15.17

Sight Unseen Presents

With Sight Unseen Presents, We’re Helping Design Week Take Over New York

By all accounts, design week in New York has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years, thanks in large part to events like ours. But to us, it was still missing that all-encompassing, can't miss, cultural takeover feeling you get whenever Fashion Week happens in New York. And so this year — in addition to OFFSITE — we decided to launch the first annual Sight Unseen Presents, an event series meant to increase the visibility of New York Design Week by activating a dozen retail spaces and restaurants throughout the city with design content and programming.

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08.16.16

At Home With

Surprise, Surprise: The Brooklyn Home of Dimes’s Chef is As Gorgeous As Her Food

If you’re not quite sure how a chef like Alissa Wagner fits into Sight Unseen’s usual focus on design and visual art, then you’ve probably never been to Dimes, the restaurant she opened with her longtime friend Sabrina De Sousa in 2013. The pioneer of a new apex of cool on East Canal Street in Manhattan, Dimes sells Cassie Griffin pottery and edible fragrances by Regime des Fleurs, and serves diners bowls of rainbow-colored food on tables inspired by Matisse cut-outs. Some people go because it’s a scene, and because the design vibe is right, but most go because those bowls — filled with things like kale gomae, wild sumac stems, and mejadra — are visual art in just about any sense of the word.

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Mast Brothers Creative Director Nathan Warkentin

10.08.15

8 Things

The Influences of Mast Brothers Creative Director Nathan Warkentin

Nathan Warkentin has been driving Mast Brothers's creative direction for the past three years, nudging it away from its original Brooklyn aesthetic and towards something more relevant. “In the beginning everything was a little old-timey, with a lot of classic or nautical patterns,” says Warkentin, whose influences we’re profiling today. “I started looking for inspiration in interesting art and architecture movements, and the work of current textile and pattern designers, to make it feel more contemporary.”

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