With offices, showrooms, and many centers of manufacturing shuttered, the coronavirus pandemic hasn’t been easy on anyone. Independent artists and designers, many of whom have limited access to their studios during city-wide lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders, are taking a serious hit. Sure, quarantine can offer precious time to get creative or think outside the box, but as many makers move beyond the craft-at-home phase of their quarantine, they are quickly coming to terms with the dire effects this public health crisis could have on their business.
Here’s our takeaway: There is no better time to support American makers. For those designers fortunate to have projects still rolling—or for collectors spending more time at home than ever—we’ve compiled a list of 25 designers and craftspeople, all plucked from the pages of AD, to shop—or if you’re feeling particularly creative—to commission.
“We were the first women in the woodshops where we worked before starting our company,” says Crystal Ellis of Egg Collective, the New York–based design firm that she launched with friends Stephanie Beamer and Hillary Petrie in 2011. Nine years later, they have left their peers in the dust, building a reputation for exquisitely crafted furniture while shaking up the male-dominated field. “We grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, with the rise of mass consumerism, so we see our process as the antithesis of that,” Ellis says of their holistic design philosophy. “We want the pieces to outlive us.” Locally crafted—whether in their own Brooklyn woodshop or nearby stone or metal ateliers—Egg’s creations promise to stand the test of time.
Realizing “how far women actually haven’t come,” says Beamer, inspired the trio to organize “Designing Women,” a 2017 group show that has grown into an annual spotlight for female-led firms. That same curatorial spirit is now found year-round at Egg’s Tribeca showroom (closed for the time being, though the sales staff is still hard at work), where their designs are displayed alongside wall coverings by Callidus Guild, textiles by Hiroko Takeda, ceramics by Bari Ziperstein, and fine art curated with Ellis’s sister, Tealia Ellis Ritter. Says Beamer, “There is no reason why a woman can’t be as qualified and as wonderful a craftsperson as a man.” eggcollective.com
2. Waka Waka
Like Albert Frey, the Eameses, and other leading West Coast lights before him, Shin Okuda, aka Waka Waka, has found a material muse in simple plywood, crafting sculptural seating, shelving, and site-specific installations. “Birch plywood is very generic, like white paper, so the design speaks more than the material,” says Okuda (pictured in his Frogtown studio), whose bespoke creations are cropping up coast to coast—from L.A.’s Owl Bureau bookstore to New York’s Forty Five Ten boutique. Now he’s branching out into metalwork, with more departures, among them an Adidas collaboration, on the horizon. wakawaka.world
3. John Hogan
Growing up in Toledo, the birthplace of America’s 1960s studio-glass movement, John Hogan started making small bowls and paperweights at the tender age of 15. “I’ve always tried to break away from preconceived ideas about glass,” says Hogan, who, in his 20s, followed in the footsteps of his predecessors—letting functionality fall by the wayside to experiment with shapes, textures, and colors. Now based in Seattle, Hogan has since translated such tests into fully realized furnishings, among them lustrous shades for light fixtures, a cocktail table with a base of mirrored blown orbs, and an ethereal cast chair.
Along the way he’s begun to consider glass at an architectural scale, developing prototypes for screens, walls, façades, and even load-bearing systems, in the case of the interlocking blocks he made with MOS Architects for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Innovation, however, just as often occurs at a small scale. For a show last year with the Future Perfect, his gallery since 2017, he created more than 100 palm-size “3D sketches,” among them black beads that look like tapioca pearls and a shimmering pink knot. Many of these processes, he notes, will scale up nicely. In glass, he explains, “you can’t just do a drawing. Much of the job is convincing people that things that don’t yet exist are possible.” johnhogandesigns.com
4. Ryan Belli
Six years ago, this L.A.-based furniture designer, at the time still in school, began interning for the Haas Brothers. Within 72 hours, the dynamic duo had hired him full-time. It’s little wonder why, judging from Belli’s own recent designs: whimsical hand-carved wood tables and seating, inspired by natural phenomena like the rock formations of Bryce Canyon. “I do the dirty work at the Haas studio,” the protégé explains, noting that while he still clocks in with the brothers, he is able to pursue his own work in his free time. “All the finishing and dreaming happens in my place in Silver Lake.” bellibellibelli.com
5. INDO-
When Urvi Sharma and Manan Narang, who both grew up in New Delhi, met at RISD in 2016, they realized they were working on similar projects: reinterpretations of the Charpai, a traditional Indian bed. They decided to join forces under the moniker INDO- and soon debuted Char Quarter, a pale beech bench with a woven cord seat and split-turned legs. Soon they took that same approach to other Indian archetypes, using ikat dyeing techniques on the tambour doors of a credenza and updating mooda seats as barstools by placing them atop skinny steel legs. (An upcoming debut includes mooda-inspired light fixtures.) Each piece comes out a little different from the last, but they embrace those variations. “Growing up, a lot of the objects we encountered were handmade,” recalls Sharma. “Now some of that is being lost for the sake of convenience. So we’re trying to celebrate an element of hand and the identity it brings with it.” indo-made.com
6. Block Shop
“We’re a family business on both sides of production,” says Lily Stockman, who cofounded her hit textiles line with sister Hopie and works with five family-run studios in India to realize their hand-block-printed patterns. After starting with graphic scarves in 2013, Block Shop has expanded into a home collection that includes pillows, bedding, rugs, and, debuting this spring, fabric by the yard. Marked by eye-popping geometric motifs and sunny SoCal palettes, it’s all on display at their Atwater Village showroom (shown), which is filled with pieces by, among other friends, Waka Waka. blockshoptextiles.com
7. Trueing
“You true a wheel to make sure it’s perfectly round,” says Josh Metersky, explaining the engineering term that he and his boyfriend, Aiden Bowman, chose when naming their design firm. Bowman finishes the thought: “It’s making something into its intended shape.” The moniker is fitting considering their slick, highly edited output. Metersky, a mechanical engineer who cut his teeth working for New York lighting designers Ladies & Gentlemen Studio and Bec Brittain, and Bowman, an alum of AD100 firms BIG–Bjarke Ingels Group and wHY Architecture, founded Trueing more than three years ago when they entered a glass-and-brass table lamp into a design competition. Their piece didn’t win, but when images appeared online, sales inquiries started rolling in.
Since then, the duo has designed hooks made from leftover dichroic glass, with no visible screws; terrazzo-inspired mirrors; and an array of colorful glass light fixtures—some made of hand-bent links, others delicately balanced borosilicate tubes. The works are fun, but no detail is without purpose. “The glass is holding the whole thing up,” says Bowman, gesturing to an Elma chandelier at Trueing’s new Long Island City studio. As Metersky proudly points out, “It’s all very engineered.” trueing.co
8. Ben Medansky
Three years ago, the ceramic artist was riding high—with coveted collections of tableware and a team of five. Then a fire in Downtown L.A. reduced his studio to ash. But rather than rebuild his practice, Medansky reimagined it, pivoting away from production batches to one-of-a-kind works and installations. “The studio downsized, but the size of the work scaled up,” reflects Medansky, now based in Frogtown with just two part-time apprentices. Encouraged by AD100 talent Kelly Wearstler, he has been busy creating wall murals, fireplace surrounds, and totems, including a 50-foot commission (shown) for her Proper Hotel in Downtown L.A. Says Medansky, “The local design community has been incredibly supportive.” benmedansky.com
9. Tantuvi
After years working on the corporate side of the fashion industry, Arati Rao needed a change. “I felt disconnected from the process of making,” explains the New York–based designer, who quit her job in 2009 and headed to India, her family’s homeland, to explore its rich craft culture. “People can make anything there,” she marvels. “You just have to find it.” Founded in 2012, her own brand, Tantuvi (it means “weaver” in Sanskrit), has quickly segued from textiles to rugs and other home products. Rather than producing the wares in factories, Rao tapped cottage industry workers in Rajasthan and Telangana to create graphic dhurries and rugs. Natural fibers are dyed by a family in Jaipur before being sent to villages in Rajasthan’s Thar Desert, where they are woven on panja looms. “There’s a true revival happening in India,” explains Rao, who launched a collection of new rugs and bath mats at Shoppe Object in February. “Government grants have resuscitated areas that lost a lot of weavers. Now more people—even Indians—want handcraft again.” tantuvistudio.com
10. Joseph Algieri
“Process, process, process,” repeats artist-designer Joseph Algieri during a visit to his Brooklyn studio—a Technicolor space of just 120 square feet, where wild material experiments unfold. Mirrors are doodled with resin, tiles frosted with grout and stacked into chunky tables, and bulbous lamps coated in goopy foam. Each piece offers a study in trial and error. “I make several iterations of everything,” he explains. “I might map out my tooling at the dollar store or Home Depot, but if they don’t have what I need, I’ll make it.” He’s not kidding. That thrift-store milkshake mixer on his shelf? Algieri uses it to whip resin and a binding agent into thick paste that he can squeeze out of a pastry bag, squiggling it onto reclaimed mirrors. That lamp on his desk? He created it (his first piece of lighting) by pouring soft Smooth-On foam over a papier-mâché mold of a traffic cone he purchased on Craigslist.
Since then, his work has found many admirers in the design community, including Voutsa’s George Venson, for whom Algieri made a cactus-shaped fixture, and Fernando Mastrangelo, who included two towering versions of that lamp in a group show at his East New York studio in September 2017. Stuck at home during the COVID-19 crisis, he’s getting back to the basics. “I’ve pulled out my gauche, my oil pastels, the conte crayon; I’m just going to relax and draw. I’ll be ideating.” josephalgieri.com
11. Voutsa
Since founding his company, Voutsa, in 2014, George Venson has helped transform the wallpaper industry from a dusty art form into a fresh creative frontier, adapting his paintings into vibrant motifs using state-of-the-art software and printers. New technology and traditional artistry, he insists, don’t have to be at odds. “Digital printing has had the reputation of being second tier,” Venson reflects. “But people just weren’t used to seeing highly considered examples treated with the same passion as screen printing.”
Creating a successful pattern, of course, is as much a mathematical exercise as a visual one. Even with the help of a computer, rhythms must be planned from the painting stage, keeping paper widths and repeat thresholds in mind so that edges meet organically, maintaining a sense of spontaneity. “You want it to flow,” says Venson, who, in a feat of right brain/left brain acrobatics, studied economics and art at Rice University. “The more you respect the painterly qualities and leave them be, the better a pattern is.” That effortless flow shows up, once again, in his latest collection of psychedelic spots and stripes debuted just last week amid the coronavirus crisis and named, appropriately, The Show Must Go On. voutsa.com
12. Roberto Lugo
Street Shrine 1: A Notorious Story stands five feet tall—nearly the height of its creator, Roberto Lugo. “It’s jarring,” says the Philadelphia-based potter of the vessel. “No pun intended.” Viewers come face-to-face with a portrait of Biggie Smalls, the legendary rapper who was shot and killed in 1997. His likeness is framed by neoclassical motifs and graphics from Versace garments, Air Jordans, and Biggie’s famous Coogi sweaters. “I want people to be confronted with death, with our culture of gun violence,” Lugo says.
In other sculptures, he has memorialized victims of police brutality like Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Freddie Gray, and celebrated African American heroes such as Angela Davis, Shirley Chisholm, and Kendrick Lamar. The work is about representation, Lugo explains, noting, “The first time I sat at a pottery wheel, I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there.” He hopes his pieces can change that for others, using imagery that will mean as much to a teenager in North Philly as a collector at Design Miami, where Wexler Gallery gave Lugo a solo booth last December. “Ceramics last thousands of years,” Lugo says. “Someday these pieces could tell the history of my community.” robertolugostudio.com
13. Soft Geometry
“Growing up in India, we both saw women artisans weaving cane at incredible speed,” remembers Utharaa Zacharias, who cofounded the San Jose, California–based studio Soft Geometry with her friend Palaash Chaudhary in 2018. That childhood memory inspired a first series of industrially produced steel chairs, some of which were outfitted with cane seats. “It takes about 48 hours to weave one,” she explains. The pair learned the technique from local cane weavers in Kerala and soon began collaborating with Indian craftspeople in other ways. When a New Delhi factory asked if they had a use for the leftover wood cutoffs, Zacharias and Chaudhary devised a technique to glue the pieces together and carve them by CNC machine into a doughnut-shaped table base. Next up, they’re working with another group of artisans on furniture and lighting that feature traditional bone inlay, which they plan to launch later this year. soft-geometry.com
14. Thomas Barger
Thomas Barger knows New York City’s recycling schedule by heart. On pickup day, he sets out ahead of the trucks, snatching bags of shredded paper. “It’s eco-friendly but also economical,” Barger says of the material, which he blends into pulp and applies to simple chairs. Wonderfully wacky—with cartoonish forms and vibrant paint jobs—his furniture and sculptures have seduced dealers Paul Johnson and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who gave Barger his first solo show at Salon 94 Design in 2018. “I’m not trained to make furniture,” admits Barger, who is now expanding his techniques—building his own timber frames, experimenting with resin, and incorporating rocks from the creek where he played as a kid. One piece is inspired by his mom folding laundry, another by his family’s Sunday suppers. As he puts it, “I guess I’m feeling nostalgic.” salon94design.com
15. Ini Archibong
It all started with a table leg. “I was sanding the form, preparing to cast it in aluminum, and felt totally connected with my creative side,” recalls Ini Archibong of his eureka moment as a student at Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Design. “I was outside the computer, shaping something myself.” Now based in Switzerland, the Nigerian-American designer continues to apply his hand to sculptural creations, among them a stirrup-shaped watch for Hermès and assorted furniture collections for the furniture company Sé and New York gallery Friedman Benda. “I want him to go outside his comfort zone,” Marc Benda reflects, having commissioned Archibong to make things for the gallery as well as his home. Archibong is game: “I’m trying not to make everything so pretty.” designbyini.com
New York–based design studio Ladies & Gentlemen—whose principals Jean Lee and Dylan Davis are shown here with Jason Miller, founder of lighting brand Roll & Hill, who sells some of their lighting designs—has been making sculptural lighting, furniture, and design objects from their Red Hook studio since 2010. Beloved by AD100 designers like Kelly Behun for their playful sense of style, they have swiftly risen to industry-wide stardom. ladiesandgentlemenstudio.com
17. Mimi Jung
At Mimi Jung’s Los Angeles studio, several looms reveal hundreds of hours of work. In one weaving, gauzy mohair seems to creep across the weft, like a live edge. In another, highlighter-yellow rope threads through thick poly-cord. “I can work an entire day on just two inches,” she says of her slow, solitary practice, beloved by the likes of Yabu Pushelberg, Philippe Malouin, and Jamie Bush. Jung, a South Korean immigrant who grew up in New York and studied fine art at Cooper Union, came to weaving by accident. In 2011 she enrolled in a machine-knitting class only to learn it was canceled a few days in advance. The program instead put her in a weaving class. In no time, she was hooked. “I immediately compared it to painting,” recalls Jung, who quickly expanded from traditional fibers such as wool and cotton into unexpected materials like mohair, which lent her works a feathery transparency. “A loom is essentially a canvas; you’re just working in a linear way.” mimijung.com
18. Anna Karlin
Anna Karlin has always followed her instincts. Just two days after starting a job at a big-time London design firm in 2006, she quit. Four years later, she moved across the Atlantic to Manhattan to set up her own art-direction firm, and a few years later, in 2012, dared to create a line of furniture. Each risk produced reward: Her art-direction business has landed clients like Adidas, Lululemon, and Fendi. And her product line—which started with sleek glassware, a hoop-shaped light, and some chess-piece stools—has captivated the design world. Now, from a moody studio-slash-showroom in Chinatown, her sculptural furniture, lighting, and accessories have become new classics. annakarlin.com
19. Katie Stout
“It’s not about being sexy,” New York–based designer Katie Stout told AD in 2017, ahead of her first solo show at New York gallery R & Company, “The girls are just having fun.” For the show, she devised a sort of squad—a series of cartoonish lamps and mirrors, the naked female forms of which Stout sculpts in clay and paints candy colors. One girl did a headstand; another sat on a friend’s shoulders. Wires went in and out of bodies; nipples at times doubled as touch sensor switches. Stout, in the years before and since, has taken the art and design worlds by storm creating furnishings that seem to laugh in the face of convention, all the while letting you in on the joke. A shaggy armoire is clad entirely in tube socks; braided rugs take the form of eyes or lips; chairs are at turns unexpected—stuffed with fabric, wrapped in vinyl—and provocatively functionless, their upholstered frames totally limp. This off-kilter sense of beauty has quickly won over daring aesthetes such as fashion iconoclast Jeremy Scott and AD100 designer Kelly Wearstler, who notes, “Katie has a truly unique point of view. She pushes materiality and takes major risks. Her work is confident and a little punk.” katiestout.com
“I wonder if we can make a chair out of just this board?” That was the simple prompt that inspired sculptor Ben Bloomstein and painter Aaron Aujla—at the time assistants to Robert Gober and Nate Lowman, respectively—to consider a new creative calling: seating. Cut and assembled into an angular armchair that evoked Donald Judd’s experiments in functionality, the 12-foot piece of pine did, in fact, yield a rather striking perch. “We’re taking a fine-art practice and saying, ‘How can we make it usable?’” explains Aujla of the approach, which the duo turned into a full-time gig in October 2017 under the name Green River Project LLC. At Bloomstein’s family farm in Hillsdale, New York, on the banks of the Green River, they set to work, quietly taking commissions for shelves, closets, and kitchen cabinetry from art-world insiders. Just three years later, they’ve emerged as a star on the design scene, churning out furniture collections and interiors projects alike, often in collaboration with menswear brand Bode. greenriverprojectllc.com
21. Chris Wolston
Chris Wolston was on a Fulbright grant in Colombia, researching manual and manufactured modes of production, when he became obsessed with an object that embodied both: the humble aluminum hot-chocolate pitcher in his apartment. “Everyday objects here have a handmade quality,” the rising design star says by phone from his current studio in Medellín. (He splits his time between there and New York.) “They’re like individual sculptures.”
Though Wolston originally came to Medellín to study pre-Columbian ceramics and brick-making, another material crush took hold. First he tracked down the pitcher’s producers: a team of local artisans specializing in sand-casting. Then, observing how they melted soda cans, engine blocks, and other discarded scraps—shaping the metal in molds of sand—the RISD graduate began forging his own tables, lamps, and chairs, using chunks of foam to create unexpected shapes and silhouettes. Casting dozens of small shapes that could later be soldered together, he has developed a new body of work shown at Manhattan’s the Future Perfect gallery. “There are hands, butts, arched backs, a nose, an ear,” he says of the anthropomorphic, subtly subversive puzzle pieces that now form cabinets, tables, vases, mirrors, chairs, and more. “I’m combining all these body parts with tropical-leaf patterns.” At Patrick Parrish gallery, meanwhile, Wolston exhibits pieces from his ongoing experimentation with terra-cotta, in which he painstakingly builds up the age-old material into tables, planters, and chairs that (like the handmade bricks he studied in Medellín) reveal deep finger marks. chriswolston.com
22. Bec Brittain
Bec Brittain has an impressive pedigree: She was lighting designer Lindsey Adelman’s first paid employee. (“New York’s lighting scene is like a family tree,” she explained.) But since going solo in 2011, Brittain has quickly established her own branch. Her flexible SHY light system—an infinitely reconfigurable constellation of LED tubes and metal rods—has become her own lighting-world claim to fame, winning her the attention of clients ranging from Mike D of the Beastie Boys to J.P. Morgan. More recently, she has pivoted into a more collectible, commission-based practice, and has moved her studio from the Flatiron space, shown here, to Long Island City. becbrittain.com
23. Material Lust
More than six years ago, designers Christian Swafford and Lauren Larson—then employees at Studio Sofield and Victoria Hagan, respectively—started using their nights and weekends for their own creative pursuits. They made sculptural coat racks that were inspired by a 1920s Man Ray photograph and chairs that bore pagan symbols, along the way leaving their day jobs to launch their own studio, Material Lust. Ever since, the couple has steadily built a portfolio of objects that hover between art and design, supplementing their income with anonymous commissions for other brands.
More recently, the duo has turned that insider knowledge into their own collection of products for a more mass market. “After working in the design world, we knew what our peers were looking for,” Swafford explains of Orphan Work, their array of lighting and objects. Hits include brushed-brass flush mounts and alabaster-and-nickel pendants, all simple and geometric. Their rectangular alabaster sconces have also been selling like crazy. “As a designer I was always looking for two sconces to go on either side of the mirror,” Larson explains. “So I made the exact sconce that I could never find.” Creating a market-driven product line, meanwhile, has allowed the duo to do something else they’d been craving—take Material Lust more fully into the art realm. material-lust.com
24. Chris Schanck
Looks are deceiving when it comes to the furniture of Detroit-based designer Christopher Schanck. The pieces from his signature Alufoil series, beloved by AD100 designers such as Peter Marino and William Sofield, appear to have been chiseled from hunks of precious metal. In reality they are crafted using bits of steel, industrial foam, and the same kind of aluminum-foil sheets you find wrapped around a chocolate bar. But as his practice proves, even humble materials can yield objects of uncommon luxury. “If you make a commitment to something very ordinary, you can still realize something special,” Schanck says of his trademark technique. Each design begins as a simple metal frame, which is then filled out using industrial foam and occasionally scraps of particle board before it is sprayed with polyurea, a material often used for truck-bed liners. Overlapping layers of aluminum foil are then applied and sealed by hand using anywhere from three to six coats of resin.
“In every piece I try to fight a sense of good taste and push more obscure proportions,” the designer says. “There are no straight lines, no perfect angles.” Schanck, who moved to Detroit after his 2011 graduation from the nearby Cranbrook Academy of Art, purchased a storefront and started his atelier, which now employs many local artists, students, and craftspeople. Schanck views his famously struggling adopted home as a kind of mood board in transformation—one from which he draws constant inspiration. In life as in work, he reflects, “imperfection is the standard.” christopherschanck.com.
25. Tillett Textiles
In 1962, when Jackie Kennedy walked CBS through the White House, TV viewers were treated to the sight of wide-stripe curtains speckled with a lively daisy motif. The fabric was by Tillett Textiles, whose painterly designs would adorn virtually all her homes thereafter—not to mention those of Babe Paley and Bunny Mellon. Today, amid the rolling hills of the Berkshires, the same textiles are being dusted off for a new generation thanks to Patrick McBride, the stepgrandson of D.D. and Leslie Tillett, who founded the company in the 1940s. Thirty-five years after the Tilletts’ son and daughter-in-law built a sprawling factory, the same complex still produces each textile by hand, printing rolls of fabric on long tables. Upstairs, a vast archive contains just about every screen ever designed. “Nothing at Tillett gets discontinued,” says McBride, noting projects are underway, including collaborations with the Alexander Girard estate and artist Robert Paige, who was part of the Brooklyn public-works project Jackie Onassis spearheaded with D.D. and Leslie in the 1970s. “To me the legacy of Tillett was so forward that it still resonates powerfully today.” t4fabrics.com
