For New York Design Week, We Curated a Collection in the Material of the Moment

Our love of ceramics has been well documented over the years; way before all the mainstream magazines and stores became potter-obsessed, we were singing the praises of then-newcomers like Helen Levi, Recreation Center, and High Gloss. But sometime over the last two years, our radars shifted a bit to another classic studio material: glass. From epic collections by Glas Italia to the rise of vintage Murano to the swell of young glass blowers creating their own pieces and collaborating with other designers, glass has been enjoying a major resurgence as of late, and the work being done with it continues to excite us. That’s why, when we began planning a New York design week project with the influential fashion boutique 4510/Six, creating our own glass collection was the obvious choice.

For Sight Unseen Glass at the 4510/Six store in New York’s Hudson Yards development, we asked 8 glass artists — as well as designers working in glass — to create a new piece just for us, and the results are on view now until they sell out. The L.A. glass artist Mark Pavlovits contributed a crazy-thick vase shaped like a Becher-esque chimney, and his neighbor Anthony Bianco made two vases from orange and opaline inverted triangular volumes. New York glass artists Andrew O. Hughes and Jeanne Messing made, respectively, a colorful confetti glass vase/carafe duo and a striped vase perched atop a small cast-glass pedestal. Trueing turned the basic element of their hot new lighting collection — a borosilicate chain — into a sculptural objet. New York furniture designer Sophie Lou Jacobsen has been working a lot in glass lately, and made us a pair of two-tone pitchers, while Kalen Kaminski’s shop Upstate, which recently launched a line of drinking glasses, scaled them up into two large freeform bowls. Finally, Portland favorite Robbie Frankel of Balefire also scaled up, making his largest vases to date in teal and a multicolored mottled pattern. If you’re interested in purchasing any of the pieces, head to 4510/Six at Hudson Yards or give the store a ring — they can ship these almost anywhere!