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09.10.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

For a Show in the Former Home of a Sculptor, Designers Respond to His Works and Collection

When the British flamenco dancer and sculptor Ron Hitchins died, he left behind a small pink Victorian house in Hackney, London. For their first exhibition, Atelier LK — a newly formed interior design studio helmed by Lisa Jones and Ruby Kean — has taken over the home, leaving intact a curated selection of the artist's work and asking 36 contemporary artists and designers to respond to it.
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09.07.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

“If Books Could Talk, What Furniture Would They Ask You to Make For Them?”

The design world sprang almost alarmingly fast back into action this week in Milan, but before that, one of the quieter — and cuter — exhibitions to appear on our radar was by the peripatetic Norwegian design collective Pyton. Together with the artist-run publishing project Heavy Books, Pyton's founders Tron Meyer, Henrik Ødegaard and Richard Øiestad created a small collection of new works to show at Galleri Golsa in Oslo. For the exhibition, Christian Tunge, the artist behind Heavy Books, gave several limited editions from his publishing house to the designers and asked: “If books could talk, what furniture would they ask you to make for them?”
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09.02.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

For His New Collab With Kvadrat, Artist Danh Vo Wrapped an Entire House in a Rediscovered Nanna Ditzel Textile

Kvadrat’s newest fabric release, Sisu, doesn’t look particularly remarkable in photos at first glance. A thick wool woven in 16 different two-color pairings, it closely resembles its cousin, Hallingdal, the best-selling textile designed in the 1960s by Danish icon Nanna Ditzel. But when we learned the full story behind its discovery and development — in collaboration with the artist Danh Vo — it was so interesting we didn’t even know where to begin telling it.
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07.30.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

The Designers on Our Radar After This Year’s Design Parade in Hyères and Toulon

As we hurtle towards the September make-up version of Salone del Mobile — which will mark the first major in-person design fair since COVID began, advisedly or not — we first wanted to turn our attention to the return of one of our favorite smaller fairs, the annual Design Parade in Hyères and Toulon from Villa Noailles in the south of France. As always, we're smitten with the competition format for these two festivals, which seems to unearth amazingly talented designers we've never heard of.
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07.29.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Exhibition Shows How Cranbrook Helped Pioneer the Cross-Disciplinary, Craft-Based, Experimental Design and Art of Today

Most people know the highlights of the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s storied 90-year history, from its campus by Eliel Saarinen to its role as a breeding ground for the stars of mid-century modernism. But in June, the school launched the results of a four-year deep-dive into its own history — in the form of a sprawling exhibition and a 600-page book, both called With Eyes Opened — that offer a much more nuanced view of Cranbrook’s game-changing influence. We spoke with curator Andrew Blauvelt about 6 artworks and objects by varied practitioners that were part of that narrative.
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06.25.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Exhibition in Los Angeles Presents “Objects as Aura”

Closing this Sunday is an exhibition in Los Angeles, called SIZED, that aims — as LA residents emerge into a newly reopened city — to recapture some of the magic of in-person, pre-pandemic events. Curated by Alexander May of Offsite.Studio, with all items available to purchase, the exhibition gathers together hundreds of objects that address our desire to collect.
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06.21.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

You’ll Never Guess Which California Town is Undergoing an Art Renaissance — Thanks, In Part, to This New Artist-Run Gallery

Here at Sight Unseen, we could of course rattle off a long list of renowned, influential city centers for art and design: Berlin, Mexico City, Seoul, Copenhagen, New York and more. But lately, Long Beach, California, has landed on our radar — yes, you heard right, Long Beach, home to the Queen Mary and Snoop Dogg, where, later this summer, a new art gallery called In Various Forms will open.
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06.07.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Step Inside Object & Thing, An Intimate Art Exhibit at the 1955 Home Gerald Luss Built for Himself

The new Object & Thing exhibition, created in collaboration with Blum & Poe and Mendes Wood DM at the Gerald Luss House in Ossining, New York, opened on May 7. Since then, I've basically treated it like the design equivalent of the Mare of Easttown finale, trying to shield myself from spoilers on social media until I could visit in person last Friday. And yet, when I got there, I realized that this was a relatively pointless task: No image can replicate the feeling of stillness that comes from being inside a house that's as well-considered as the Luss House, and no Instagram tour can capture all the details that make this particular collaboration so satisfying.
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Soft Baroque Sun City
05.05.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Blistered Leather and Melted Aluminum — Soft Baroque’s New Works Were Inspired By the Sun

After a year of pretty much everything being on hold, we’re finally seeing the fruits of some of that pre-COVID labor. For those of us here in Milan, that means projects originally slated for the canceled 2020 Design Week are at last seeing the light of day. One of the better projects to have made it out the other side is Sun City, a collaboration between PIN-UP magazine, Soft Baroque, and Marséll, the Milanese footwear brand. Set over three levels in Marséll’s headquarters in an ex-factory in the Porta Romana district, Soft Baroque debuted — during the Digital Design Days in April — a slew of new work, each piece loosely inspired by the sun.
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05.03.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Motherhood — And the Ways In Which It Challenges Us to Create — Is At the Center of This Exhibition

The idea for Egg Collective's third "Designing Women" exhibition was born long before the pandemic struck. Back in 2018, Egg's co-founders — Hilary Petrie, Crystal Ellis, and Stephanie Beamer, along with Ellis's sister, the artist Tealia Ellis Ritter — had the idea to curate a selection of female artists and designers who also happened to be mothers, and who often worked with or chafed against the constraints of motherhood in order to create.
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