Displaying items by tag: American Design

New York’s Museum of Arts and Design (formerly the American Craft Museum) is currently hosting its inaugural “NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial,” an exhibition that highlights the city’s vast and varied creative communities. The first show to be organized under the leadership of the museum’s new Director Glenn Adamson, “NYC Makers” spotlights the work of 100 artisans, artists, and designers, living and working in New York City. The roster runs the gamut from famous creative figures such as performance artist Laurie Anderson and multimedia artist/singer-songwriter Yoko Ono to furniture designers, fashion designers, and architects.

The goal of the exhibition is to further the museum’s ongoing commitment to craftsmanship across all creative fields, promoting not only makers who exhibit their work in a museum setting, but also those who operate behind the scenes or on a more practical level. Makers featured in the exhibition were nominated by a pool of over 300 New York City-based cultural leaders, including curators, choreographers, academics, and journalists. Finalists were hand-picked by a jury led by Adamson and exhibition curator Jake Yuzna, the museum’s Director of Public Programs, based on their mastery of their respective craft.

Design Miami/Basel, a global forum focused on collectible design, offered select guests a sneak peek of its offerings during a VIP preview on Monday, June 16. The event, which takes place alongside Art Basel in Switzerland, is open to the public from Tuesday, June 17 through Sunday, June 22.

Bringing together collectors, gallerists, designers, and curators, Design Miami/Basel celebrates design culture and commerce through museum-quality exhibitions, educational lectures, and commissions from the world’s top emerging and established designers and architects. The marketplace portion of the fair features celebrated design galleries from around the world exhibiting furniture, lighting, and objets d’art. Offerings range from 18th- and 19th-century antiques to early Modernist objects and contemporary design.

For millennia, humans have utilized seating furniture. The earliest surviving three-dimensional depiction of a chair is a clay model dating back to approximately 4750–4600 BCE; the oldest surviving chair belonged to the Egyptian princess Sitamun (Cairo Museum) and dates to approximately 1400 BCE. European immigrants to the New World in the seventeenth century brought chairs and other furnishings with them and began to produce chairs domestically shortly thereafter, adhering to the European prototypes. It was not until the early nineteenth century that Americans began to manufacture furnishings which, while they still borrowed classical and European motifs, had a decidedly American flavor.