At the New Brooklyn Museum Café, 10 Stools by 10 Designers, Reminding Us of the Borough They Call Home

For as long as I toil in the trenches of design, I’ll never tire of the design brief that goes: “Everyone please take this same basic thing and mold it in your image.” The results of such an assignment are nearly always uniformly delightful, so I was happy to see the debut of this latest project, commissioned by the bicoastal studio Office of Tangible Space, run by Michael Yarinsky and Kelley Perumbuti. As part of the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th anniversary, Office of Tangible Space was asked to redesign the museum’s café, and they called upon their Brooklyn design friends to each take a basic wooden stool, and from it, create a one-of-a-kind work of art with which to decorate the space.

For his piece, ceramicist Cody Hoyt took some of the surplus clay tiles from his studio (to our eye, they’re leftover from his work with The Future Perfect) and puzzled out how to arrange them over the stool’s exterior surface. Ellen Pong inset her stool with fossilized stoneware reliefs depicting a collection of items prone to being misplaced, hidden, or stuck under the table. Chen Chen & Kai Williams decorated theirs with acrylic panels harboring dried flowers and weeds they plucked from Brooklyn sidewalks. The artist Emma Kohlmann painted hers with images of lichen, inspired by Anna Atkins’s cyanotypes from the early 19th century. Sarah Nsikak covered hers in vintage textiles; Allan Wexler sliced his in half, adding panels to make a loveseat; Kim Mupangilaï adorned hers with teak, banana fiber, and volcanic rock, materials symbolic of her Belgian-Congolese upbringing; Gracelee Lawrence drilled small peepholes in hers, filling them with 3D printed organic fragments encased in resin; Vincent Jackson used oil pastels to depict signature figurative motifs; and Minjae Kim draped his seat with his oft-deployed quilted resin, shrugging, “Sometimes you just want to put a roof over a precious thing.” The handcrafted pieces, Yarinsky and Perembuti say, not only complement the café’s design but also “echo the philosophy that food, like art, is an immersive experience — engaging the senses, sparking conversation, and creating a connection between the creator and the audience.”

Photos by Claire Esparros, installation photos by Matthew Gordon