A NYCxDESIGN Chorus
New York Design Week’s highlights and lowblows—as recounted to an absentee editor
Hey there, housemates.
So here’s what happened. I had a multi-tab spreadsheet, a color-coded calendar, email invitations, planned social posts, multiple rounds of bus tickets, and around 15 coffee dates to carry me through NYCxDESIGN, New York’s design week. And then, suddenly, I had to drop all of it to hop a plane to Florida. It was, culturally speaking, about as far away from the city as I could get.
So for me, the busiest part of this season was over before it started—at least outside of the sad, glowing screen I stared at from a thousand miles away. But design week coverage at Wrong House stops for nothing! If I couldn’t be there in person, I still wanted an on-the-ground report from the Design Writing With Guts (™) fam that I knew would be pinballing around town.
The fruits of that labor—what I am calling our NYCxDESIGN Chorus—can be found below, with thanks to contributors Jesse Dorris, Dan Howarth, Adrian Madlener, Liz Ryan (whose illustrations carried us through the week), and my trusty fellow editor July Winters.
Hope to see you at the next one.
xx
Lila
Tiny Shirts and Ramen Noodles
Jumping the official NYCxDESIGN starting gun, The Future Perfect packed its West Village townhouse on Tuesday, May 12, for a morning preview of two very different showcases straddling the high-low divide. While half the attendees arrived to swoon at Athena Calderone’s new furniture line, the others (myself included) were there to ogle at 140 night lights commissioned by Philadelphia-based collective Dudd Haus—whose punk-style Jonald Dudd exhibitions have been delighting New York’s design festival goers for many years. Ranging from a $10 ball of dried ramen noodles by Warren Young to a $6,202.50 patchwork of sea shells, sea glass, and sea coal by Caely Melford, the compact lights were displayed inside the basement’s emptied wine fridges and across a large wall on an upper-floor landing.
The most buzzy luminaires of the bunch—at least according to the guests packed onto the David Chipperfield–designed staircase or basking on the roof deck—were Andrew Laska and Mohammad Asgari’s toothpaste tube, which oozed glowing green paste; Kate Bailey’s altar to Luigi Mangione complete with pill-bottle “candles”; Stefanie Haining’s miniature light-up 7-Eleven; and my personal favorite: a tiny illuminated striped-blue shirt by Nino Chambers. (I would’ve walked away with it myself if I had $700 to spare.) The creativity and whimsy demonstrated across the exhibit proved just how much fun designers can have with an open brief, and offered a wonderfully unserious start to this year’s festivities. —Dan Howarth
Late Night Shining
Liz here. My design week kicked off with the group show After Hours at Sake Bar Asoko; colored pencils sharpened, trusty piece of plexiglass tucked under my arm. While stashing my book bag in an empty planter pot, I bumped into Scott Newlin, one of the hosts of the evening.
Scott set me up with a seat in the middle of the action and a glass of his favorite sake (I forget the name but it was warm and sea salty and delicious). Part of my evening was spent chatting with Sergio Mannino, who told me about a new lamp he was debuting this week at Shine.
One of my favorite pieces in Scott and Keith’s show was Rose Wong‘s collection of hand-sewn sake bottle tapestries. I’m biased but I love when illustrators translate their work to other mediums (see Bill Rebholz’s wooden figures). More of that please. —Liz Ryan
Next-Level Party Design at USM
I regret not arriving to this event earlier because I heard the drawers were full of food, à l’Automat. My producer brain briefly fixated on the odds of a lone tomato galette getting left behind in one of the shiny USM Haller cabinets, but folks at this event were hungry, in a no-crumbs-left-behind kind of way.
I too came to imbibe: Specifically, the champagne tower headliner (it was technically a cocktail tower, but you get what I mean), by Pinch Food Design. Downstairs, partygoers lounged in moody domestic sets and sipped wine decanted (distilled? aerated?) through pyramidal glass carafes.
I ran into a new pal, creative director Emily Chang, and we tried our luck poking around, but either the closet drawers were fresh out of eclairs or someone made a wise decision to keep food out of the upholstered zones. —L.R.
House Party in the Big Pink Building
No, there weren’t blasting speakers, beer pong, or any of the other usual tells of the genre—but there’s no denying that on May 13, a house party was exactly what was afoot at the pink building on the corner of Myrtle and Vanderbilt Avenues in Brooklyn. Nothing Comes From Nothing, curated by Office of Tangible Space and Verso, greeted guests from the ground level exhibition space of 144 Vanderbilt, a residential complex developed by Tankhouse and designed by SO–IL. For a moment, things felt frozen in time—perhaps thanks to the gold hands of a clock which sat confidently unmoving at 3:20 p.m. Additional trinkets from Carl Auböck’s Assorted Objects, c. 1950s–1960s—a mix of practical objects and more decorative miniature sculptures—rested on Natalie Shook’s large oak sculpture Boy (2024), with organic, asymmetrical forms carved from various types of wood branching out from a blocky black column at the center of the exhibition. But rather than feeling stuck in the past, the curators seemed to have endowed the historic objects with a kind of perpetuity. With the artist’s contemporary pieces as a reference point, the curators made pairings with historic works inside the lobby. The austere architecture added something vaguely industrial to the blend of old and new. One visitor, apparently a neighbor, looked around in awe: “I thought this was just the ugly pink building on the corner.” (Our apologies to SO–IL.)
Upstairs, the party got hotter thanks to a second, residential installation from the Office of Tangible Space. This time, their curatorial prowess turned to design in Brazil through the collection of Espasso. As records spun, attendees pressed shoulder to shoulder, squeezing up the stairs and through the halls, taking photos from the balcony and test-driving chairs from the Espasso collection. The group seemed to be in consensus that the soft, diffused lighting and mounted yarn work in the living room brought much-needed warmth to the space: shoutout to Kawabi and Kat Howard, I love what you’ve done with the place. Same time next year? —July Winters
Luke Malaney Mines Madness From the Mundane
Here are a few of the semi-functional and non-functional sculptures on view at Loose Grip, Luke Malaney’s curatorial debut at 144 Vanderbilt:
Richard Snyder’s Code Violation installation from 1996—a wooden stove, ironically made from the logs it’s designed to combust
New carapace–like stoneware bowls by Adam Cutts
Louis Sarowsky’s Brownstone Beanie wall relief from 2023—A wayward cap carved into a fragment of displaced building material
Panos Mavridis’s 2022 Study—A hyper-realistic charcoal drawing of a man sketching
Daniel Weiss’s Goldfish Shoes—A 2013 photo of platform shoes with fish-tank heels
A cabinet with no actual storage shelves and a handle fashioned as an oversized cigarette
The last of these is the making of Malaney himself, a woodworker and rising star in Brooklyn’s collectible space. True to form for New York’s still-scrappy and community-driven design scene, this group show brings together works by interdisciplinary talents that defy categorization as designers or artists, and all share a Red Hook workspace.
Placed within this two-bedroom apartment at Fort Greene’s candy-pink complex—also home to showings from Kalon Studios (via Assembly Line’s Residence) and Paraphernalia, in addition to the exhibitions in the blurb above—these unabashedly playful and irreverent objects riff on the everyday functions we might otherwise take for granted, hinting that there’s absurdity in the mundane.
But even more importantly, they demonstrate how so many independent creatives continue to work hands-on in their medium of choice. This process appears to allow these makers to more closely control the realization of their idea without the adulteration or watering-down that can sometimes happen through outside fabrication. In doing so, it creates space for a more direct form of experimentation—one that can challenge the conventions of everyday life. —Adrian Madlener
Hurdling, Jiggling Little Blobs
Depending upon your practice, Sunday night was either the end point of your art marathon, the mid-point of your multidisciplinary romp, or somewhere near your entry into a hyped and oversubscribed design week. Or maybe you’d just stumbled through the sudden summer Red Hook heat to Natalie Shook’s Piscina gallery, from which a crowd spilled and lingered, nursing beers pulled from metal ice buckets and sharing snacks and gossip.
Inside, the remodeled showroom was warm, all sage alcoves tucked within creamy arches. Garnier Pingree’s Volute chair welcomed visitors in curves of birds-eye maple and velvet. Deeper still, the new gallery space offered From the Studio: Drawings and Sketches by Artists and Designers, more than 50 illustrations and material explorations in which designers thought out loud, by hand, on paper. Some anticipated a future life as furniture, including Pingree’s own elegant preparatory for Volute. Others, like Kiki Goti’s eye-popping Study on Color and Form, struck up a conversation with a neighbor—in Goti’s case, Workaday Handmade’s buttery wedge of glazed stoneware Sleep Backwards Table. The show is chatty, and so was the crowd, and it was all a bustling reminder of what happens when you take what you make into public.
Halfway or so through the opening, a reprehensible email from the design week majordomos marched into my inbox. Its subject line, ill-formed and too long, was a threat: AI is here to stay! Now how will you…. How will I what, I thought. In front of me was Hannah Bigeleisen’s amorphous yet personable Small Blob Drawing, in which the titular forms rainbowed and shimmered on their little plane. They looked full of potential. They just needed a hand. So unlike those in power, hellbent on marching us towards laziness in the guise of efficiency, to environmental catastrophe in exchange for the chance to plagiarize for (maybe) a living, to the complete dismantling of the relationship, however fraught, between maker and object made. But out here, tonight, the little blob seemed to jiggle. In their in-between states, they seemed here to stay. The opening crowd swelled, and I felt a little sentimental at all the hubbub, the ambition and cynicism, all the life here and what might be soon to come—around the corner, even, at the next show. —Jesse Dorris
Afternoon Delight
It’s Sunday afternoon and 90 degrees outside. Ideal weather to hide away at the WSA building. Afternoon Light occupies two floors and feels less like a fair and more like a construction of little design islands. (I say this as a person who has been to exactly two art fairs.) The first thing that caught my eye was RS Barcelona’s foosball table, with its colorful little players. I loitered around their section for a while hoping to capture some folks playing with it, but the allure of the ping pong table was too strong.
From there, I had a string of friendly conversations with Kelsey Fairhurst (Forks Plus), Nate Scheibe (Scheibe Design), Amanda Dandaneau (Wallpaper Projects), and the one and only Eric Trine. Eric was in from LA and fielding design questions from fair attendees, in an IRL edition of his advice column, Chair Time.
Eric: Someone came up to me and said “I was told I could bring my existential problems to you, is that true?” and I was like, “Well, yes.”
He didn’t disclose the nature of their distress. (I assume chair-designer-confidentiality rules apply.) —L.R.
Stumping Grounds
As the Design Week marathon continued, a separate heat of ICFF brought crowds down from the Javits Center to Soho—to a cocktail bar at Host on Howard serving as Monday night’s hydration station. The Look Book Offsite exhibition Form and Feeling, curated by Julia Haney Montanez, brought 16 artists together for a refreshing moment beyond the fairgrounds, with works by up-and-comers like Vy Voi, Thomas Yang, Anna Dawson, and Aaron Getman Pickering.
I felt called to Ian Love’s white oak stools, hand carved with wood felled from his hometown on Long Island. In a quick conversation, the former musician, sculptor, and furniture designer shared some insight into his work. —J.W.
How’s ICFF going for you?
It’s going great, yeah. It’s probably my sixth or seventh year that I’ve done it, and this one feels really good.
How many steps do you think you got in today?
Oh my gosh. I don’t know, but my feet and knees definitely feel like they’re gonna fall off, so probably a good amount.
Where are you as an artist now versus when you started?
I mean, I’m about to be 51, and I didn’t touch a tool until I was in my 40s, so it was like a second career for me. I kind of fell in love with making things, and it’s been a development, so every year I change my language a little bit. I don’t put a limit on what it’s supposed to be, it just kind of happens, but every year I use NYCxDESIGN and ICFF as a point to push myself—it’s like ‘What can I do next?’ I don’t want to just keep showing the same thing over and over again.
What happens when the material doesn’t do what you want it to do?
It’s frustrating. In the beginning, I didn’t know what to do, but now there are two things that can happen: It can either be totally disastrous, and the thing is useless—or, it’s not what I initially thought it would be, and I have to figure out how to make it work as something else. And sometimes those are the pieces that are the most unique, and the things I like the most.
I really try not to throw stuff away, and that’s actually how I started making all these sculptures. Because the pieces that weren’t good enough for furniture, I knew they would be good enough for a sculpture because they weren’t being used as highly.
What advice would you give someone on the cusp of a pivot?
Do not be afraid to put yourself out there. Do not be afraid of risks or failure. If you do fail, that can be a real asset as well. It usually makes you better—a better artist, maker, or whatever it might be.
Re-School’s in Session
Dear diary, I am tired. Vitra is my last event of design week and a blessedly short bike ride away from my studio. I’ve been to enough events at this Bowery showroom (*cough* Wrong House launch) to know you’ve gotta get there on time to secure a good seat.
I climbed up their funky new Reset seating and set up camp for the panel discussion, which Wrong House is co-hosting. In Lila’s absence, Diana Budds is leading the conversation. Toy designer Cas Holman, Dutch architect Florian Idenburg, and Vitra’s own Thor Ochs chatted about play, friction, and the spaces in between. I won’t lie, I was a bit distracted trying to capture the speakers’ likenesses, but one of Cas’s anecdotes made me stop and tune in more properly. Speaking on the topic of her Rigamajig building kit (and heavily paraphrased by yours truly),
“The nuts and bolts could be any color. I made them black so the kids think they’re real. Then when the kids see tools out in the world, they’ll go, ‘Oh—I can play with this.’ But what I’m trying to instill in them is ‘No—you can play with anything.” —L.R. ⌂
Writing by Jesse Dorris, Dan Howarth, Adrian Madlener, Liz Ryan, and July Winters
Illustrations by Liz Ryan