Muji Materials Garden by Ladies & Gentlemen

06.04.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

Ladies & Gentlemen’s MUJI Materials Garden Was a Match Made in Minimalist Heaven

For this year’s NYCxDESIGN, MUJI teamed up with Jean Lee and Dylan Davis of Ladies & Gentlemen Studio on an installation to commemorate the Japanese lifestyle brand's ten years in the U.S. — the brand’s first-ever collaboration with an American designer. Called MUJI Materials Garden, the installation was comprised of seven vignettes showcasing MUJI collection mainstays alongside the materials from which they’re made.

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05.30.18

Fair Report

Our 75+ Favorite Finds From New York Design Week 2018

With the move of Collective Design back to March, NYC x Design — nowadays jokingly referred to as "New York Design Month" — technically shrunk a bit this year to just 15 days long, from the beginning of Egg Collective's Designing Women show to the last day of ICFF. Yet its cornucopia of content was as impressive as ever.

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05.25.17

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Take a Tour of Our 2017 Sight Unseen OFFSITE Show, Part I

Conventional wisdom suggests that for an event to be considered truly successful, it's supposed to get bigger every year. But here at Sight Unseen, we've always put curation before commerce, and so when we began pondering back in October whether Sight Unseen OFFSITE might benefit from a tighter, smaller, more elevated edit, we had no qualms whatsoever about scaling down. Whereas in 2016 we hosted more than 70 exhibitors in 20,000 square feet, our 2017 show featured just 25 exhibitors in 13,000 square feet — and yet it was widely credited as being the best we've ever done.

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05.23.17

Sight Unseen Presents

An Office Furniture Showroom Turned Tropical Oasis in the Middle of Manhattan

The monthlong extravaganza that is NYCxDesign may be drawing to a close — and our Sight Unseen OFFSITE show officially cleared of all the beautiful pieces that made it such a success — but there's still time to catch some of the smaller exhibitions we lent our name and our curation to this week. One of our favorite projects was an installation in the showroom of the Italian furniture brand Arper, who allowed us to take over a small section of their airy Soho space in order to showcase Arper's colorful new seating collections, Arcos and Cila.

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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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05.16.17

Sight Unseen Presents

Natalie Weinberger’s Ceramic-Topped Tables at The Primary Essentials

Earlier this year, Natalie Weinberger struck up a collaboration with Peter Thorne, a woodworker in the Berkshires with whom she’s developed a series of ceramic-topped tables on turned-wood legs. Those tables are debuting this week as part of Sight Unseen Presents at The Primary Essentials, the Atlantic Avenue design shop owned by Lauren Snyder, who was one of the first to carry Weinberger’s work. We recently photographed Weinberger’s Brooklyn studio but asked Snyder, who knows her work better than anyone, to conduct the interview.

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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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05.09.17

Fair Report

Collective, The Future Perfect, Chamber, and More: The Best of NYCxDesign, So Far

Remember when New York Design Week was, well, a week? This year, the festival known as NYCxDesign stretches all the way from May 3 through May 24, making this a marathon for those involved, as we are, in both design and art. The best thing about the new, elongated schedule, though, is that we actually got to see much of the good stuff, launching as it did last week before our own Sight Unseen OFFSITE fair kicks into high gear. Here are two dozen favorites from New York design month — so far.

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05.03.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

Egg Collective’s Designing Women Exhibition is This Week’s Must-Visit

Perhaps it was inevitable that this year's NYCxDesign would focus so heavily on women. After all, the works on view this month were in many cases developed within the last half a year or so — a time when womanhood itself has been under attack in America. What this means for design is that over the next few weeks, we'll see, among other things, an all-female exhibition at Chamber Gallery, two brand-new female designers launching at Sight Unseen OFFSITE in a special capsule section, and Designing Women, an exhibition that opened this Monday, curated by Egg Collective and featuring 16 New York–based female artists and designers.

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05.23.16

Fair Report

The Best of New York Design Week 2016

New York Design Week may come hot on the heels each year of the all-consuming behemoth that is the Milan furniture fair, but to pay it any less attention would be a mistake — between Sight Unseen OFFSITE, ICFF, Colony, Wanted, and the goings-on at outposts like the Future Perfect and Matter, the days when America's most important contemporary design event was simply a watered-down rehash of Europe's are indisputably over. Here's a roundup our favorite finds from this year's show.

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05.23.14

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

A Tour of the Sight Unseen OFFSITE 2014 Show: Part I

When we founded the Noho Design District back in 2009, it was meant to provide a much-needed, well-curated platform for independent designers, whose numbers — particularly in America — had begun to surge. But it was also meant to add an extra dose of dimension and excitement to New York Design Week (or NYCxDesign, as it has since come to be known), which at the time was considered preeeeeetty lackluster, to say the least. By that measure alone, the first edition of Sight Unseen OFFSITE, our successor to the Noho Design District, was a massive success; word on the street was that this NYDW was the best anyone could remember, and we're proud to have played a significant role.

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05.10.14

Saturday Selects

Week of May 5, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a little bit of Scandinavian design heaven in downtown Los Angeles, lots of emerging designers under one roof in far-out Brooklyn, and a preview of the design hothouse that is the coming week in New York City.

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