London designers Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard are deeply invested in material experimentation as a way of generating form. My monographic book on their work, surveying their career from the couple’s first meeting at Central St. Martin’s through to the their most recent work, is published in 2017 by Skira. Following is an excerpt to the volume’s introduction.
Read MoreCommissioned by curator Brendan Cormier of the Victoria and Albert Museum for 'Values of Design,' published on the opening of the V&A Gallery in Shekou, China.
Read MoreComposed on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the American glass movement, which began in Toledo in 1962, a version of this text was presented as a lecture at the Glass Art Society Conference in 2012. A published version followed in the GAS Journal.
Read MoreArt in the Making: Artists and Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing is a collaborative book project, written together with Julia-Bryan Wilson. Coming at the topic of art-making from two different directions – myself from craft studies, and Julia from postwar art history – we argue for the interpretive relevance of production. Moving from seemingly obvious topics like painting and woodworking to distributed authorship methods, like the hiring of fabricators and online outsourcing, we consider various ways of making art and the impact that productive decisions have on aesthetics and meaning.
Read MoreThis is one entry of a blog called “From Sketch to Product” which I wrote while at the V&A, from 2009 to 2011. The nominal topic was design drawings, and the way that they affected the finished design. Along the way the blog wandered a bit, including a series of posts that covered the behind-the-scenes design process of the Postmodernism exhibition I was co-curating at the time. This particular post discusses the work of the industrial designer Jane Dillon, who like many women of her generation did great work and got too little credit for it.
Read MoreIn 1919, Marcel Duchamp presented his patron Walter Arensberg with a small quantity of air. It was contained inside a blown glass ampule, which he had purchased from a pharmacist, and was labeled: 50cc of Paris Air.
Read MoreThis exhibition, co-curated with Andrew Perchuk of the Getty Research Institute and Assistant Curator Barbara Paris Gifford, was the first exhibition to focus on the early career of Peter Voulkos, whose radical methods and ideas during this period opened up the possibilities for clay in ways that are still being felt today. The exhibition opened at the Museum of Arts and Design and subsequently traveled to the Renwick Gallery.
Read MoreThings of Beauty Growing: British Studio Pottery, co-curated with Martina Droth and Simon Olding, opens at the Yale Center British Art in 2017 and travels to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in 2018. The exhibition tells the story of studio ceramics in Britain, from the 1920s to the present, through the evolution of the vessel form.
Read MoreThis exhibition was curated for Friedman Benda Gallery in New York City, in January 2017. A selective core sample of radical design works from the 1960s through the late 1980s, the show was sheathed in a projection of ‘white noise’ and a low-volume hiss of feedback.
Read MorePostmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970 to 1990, co-curated with Jane Pavitt with the assistance of Oliver Winchester, opened at the V&A in 2011 and subsequently toured to MART in Rovereto and the Swiss National Museum, Zurich. The exhibition traced the intellectual and stylistic progression of postmodern art and design, from its initial radicalism to its eventual commodification. The show was accompanied by a major catalogue with 40 commissioned essays, and a synthetic curatorial overview. The exhibition design, by Carmody Groarke and A Practice For Everyday Life, drew on period motifs while presenting a contemporary setting within the V&A’s Victorian architecture.
Read MoreA monographic study of a Milwaukee-based designer, Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World was on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2003. Staged in the museum’s newly opened wing, designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, the show included several vehicles, among them the Skytop Lounge observation train car from the streamlined 1947 Hiawatha, and a period Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.
Read MoreThe perfect repair would be an invisible one. The hope is to completely restore a broken object to its original function and appearance. But no repair is perfect. It’s not possible to turn back the clock, and no matter how skilled the restoration, it will be detectable - at least to expert eyes. This means that, aesthetically speaking, fixing works against itself. It involves a process of self-erasure; the more skilled the repair, the less visible it will be.
Read MoreBeazley Designs of the Year is an annual project at the Design Museum, London. The show is composed of about 65 international projects proposed by invited nominators (academics, critics and designers) that cover six areas of design - architecture, product, graphics, fashion, digital and transport design.
Read MoreThe favorite punching bag of American furniture scholarship is elitism—the historical preference for objects made for the wealthy. Yet, scholars often focus on extraordinary pieces of furniture for a good reason: because they seem to have more to say.
Read MoreGousse Bonnin and George Anthony Morris were manufacturers of the most self-conscious stripe, their every maneuver calculated for effect. So why did they think that stylish Philadelphians would want a scientific-quality model of marine life in the middle of their well-set tables?
Read More
