If you tour the design studios of a major car company, you might expect to see lots of glowing screens and high-tech equipment giving shape to the vehicles of tomorrow. What you might not expect, however, is to come across a large curved form with the unmistakable craggy surface of clay being smoothed over by a pair of hands and a smoothing tool. But even in 2020, that’s just what you’ll find: sculptors working on precisely formed life-sized models of new cars – in clay.
Read MoreAmerican homes are hotbeds of creativity, and not just because artists and makers often convert their basements and garages into studios. Reality and educational TV, including streaming content, YouTube, and even social media, offer viewers practical instruction alongside something perhaps even more valuable: a taste of the discourse around different kinds of making from professionals in different fields.
Read MoreHow do we want to live? That’s the question that has driven designers and architects for as long as human beings have been building and customizing their dwellings. A timely new exhibition called “Home Stories: 100 Years, 20 Visionary Interiors,” opening February 8 at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, provides a fascinating look at how designers have tried to answer this question over the past century.
Read MoreThe punch cards that give instructions to the warp threads on a Jacquard loom are almost works of art in their own right. Each is a rectangle, linked to the next by plain white threads to form a long chain. The cards are punched with rows of round holes in rhythmic patterns; each hole is the same size, but the patterns they form vary from card to card. Watching them click past one another as a woven pattern takes shape on a loom is hypnotic.
Read MoreDuring the years that Henry Chapman Mercer was assembling his collection of early American tools and artefacts of material culture, the United States was industrializing at lightning speed. In Mercer’s lifetime (1856–1930), factories, railroads, radio, automobiles and home appliances transformed American cities and farms, as well as the interior spaces in which Americans lived and worked.
Read MoreWhat if you have an idea for an artwork inspired by Wedgwood ceramics, but you want to make it with paper pulp? Or if you know how to sculpt in clay, but want to make a fishbowl in glass? What if you dream of crafting pillows in porcelain? Artist residencies often attract medium-specific makers who want to spend time doing exactly what they do best, perhaps teaching workshops or giving demonstrations. But what about artists who want to explore something they’re not an expert in?
Read MoreThe neighborhood is quintessential South Philadelphia. East of the city’s Italian Market along the Delaware River, Pennsport’s streets are lined with weathered brick row houses and anchored by 19th-century school buildings and grand churches. The clubs that participate in the Mummers Parade, the colorful folk festival held on New Year’s Day every year since 1901, have their workshops along 2nd Street.
Read MoreIn the 1957 romantic comedy Funny Face, Kay Thompson—playing a larger-than-life fashion editor inspired by Diana Vreeland—leads a musical number in which she marshals her staff (and presumably the world at large) to “think pink!” Bolts of Pepto Bismol–colored fabric unfurl across her carpeted office floor as she tells her junior editors to “bury the beige.”
Read MoreWharton Esherick’s name looms large in Philadelphia. The famed sculptor and woodworker (1887 – 1970) was born there and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His studio in nearby Paoli is now the site of the Wharton Esherick Museum, home to what is undoubtedly the most famous spiral staircase in Pennsylvania – a feature that he designed and built himself.
Read MoreWhen Mexican puppeteer Sofía Padilla met Davey T. Steinman, a performance artist who hails from Minnesota, while volunteering at Vermont’s celebrated Bread and Puppet Theater in 2015, they were right in the thick of it, Padilla says, “stomping on clay and doing papier mâché for a 10-foot-long puppet hand.” Perhaps they didn’t realize it then – with glue on their hands and clay on their feet – but that initial collaboration would soon blossom into a romantic partnership and the formation of their own touring puppet theater, Paradox Teatro.
Read MoreSince the “Big Three” networks and basic cable gave way to streaming services, TV viewers have had access to a dizzying variety of on-demand offerings in increasingly specific genres. As a result, we’ve drifted further and further away from the shared viewing experiences of previous generations, like the Season 3 Dallas cliffhanger in 1980 that left millions of viewers asking “Who shot J.R.?” all summer.
Read MoreWhen Sonya Clark and the team at the Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum were putting the final touches on the installation of her exhibition “Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know,” it became clear that the gallery space – which houses an array of works made from subdued white textiles – needed a bit of vivid color.
Read MoreArtist and textile designer Suzanne Tick, founder of Tick Studio, tries to focus on the present. Each day, her staffers meditate together in the office, which is housed in an East Village town house where Tick also lives. The meditation is a prelude to conversation, she explains: “We clear our minds and then…have a thoughtful discussion of what’s happening in culture, art, and architecture.”
Read MoreVisitors to Marc Newson’s lavish design exhibition at Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street could have been forgiven for wondering if they’d been transported back to the 18th century — albeit an oddly minimalist version of the age of Rococo. That’s not because of the deluxe surfboards that were on view, though these works were transporting in their sleekness and vivid colours.
Read MoreWe often think of apartment kitchens as problems to be solved. They’re likely to be short on counter space, storage, and light, or they’re stubbornly out of step with trends in interior design. As renters, we may try to spruce them up with extra shelves and unusual drawer pulls.
Read MoreIn the summer of 1898, the Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay made a discovery that would eventually give the Moulin Rouge in Paris, the Las Vegas Strip, and New York’s Times Square their perpetual nighttime glow. Using the boiling point of argon as a reference point, Ramsay and his colleague Morris W. Travers isolated three more noble gases and gave them evocative Greek names: neon, krypton, and xenon.
Read MoreWhere would you be most likely to go in search of exquisite handcrafted objects or clothing? If you live in North America or Europe, your first answer probably isn’t “the nearest department store.” The idea of Bloomingdale’s or Neiman Marcus selling handwoven baskets or lathe-turned wooden plates and bowls is about as implausible as it is thrilling.
Read MoreAbout halfway through “The Downsizers,” the third episode of the new Netflix series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, the 11-year-old Kayci Mersier and her 12-year-old brother, Nolan, are sorting through gigantic piles of clothing, piece by piece. They bid a grateful farewell to the things they no longer wear, and let others—the ones that “spark joy”—know they will be happily worn in the future. “You’ve done so much good for me; I thank you for that,” Nolan tells a jacket, giving it a little hug before setting it down.
Read MoreStarting around Thanksgiving, one can hardly run an errand or ride an elevator without being serenaded by Christmas music. The songs cover familiar seasonal territory—silver bells, open sleighs, roasting chestnuts—as well as a timeless emotion: desire. Just think of Eartha Kitt flirting with “Santa Baby,” Mariah Carey donning a Santa hat to sing “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” or George Michael pining for a lost love in “Last Christmas,” by Wham! But all of those romantic lyrics about wanting and wishing also happen to tap into a different, but no less powerful desire: the urge to shop.
Read MoreIn the May 14, 1967, issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer, art critic Victoria Donohoe described the Museum of Merchandise— an art exhibition disguised as a department store, organized by the Arts Council of the local YMCA/YWHA— as having “sufficient vigor and originality to project itself beyond a local audience.” She added that “magazines and newspapers in other cities [had] given the art event advance coverage, probably because it is as restless and provocative a concept as anything seen in recent years.”
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