Monica Obniski – författare

A multifaceted look at the work of award-winning American industrial designer Stephen BurksThrough essays, photo-essays, and a conversation between Black designer Stephen Burks (b. 1969) and the late cultural critic bell hooks, this book contextualizes Burks’s wide-ranging work while exploring design’s influence on politics, society, and culture. Burks’s work is underpinned by his belief in a pluralistic vision of design that is inclusive of all cultural perspectives; the award-winning designer has been commissioned by many of the world’s leading design-driven brands to develop collections that engage hand production as a strategy for innovation.The book centers the industrial design and craft collaborations within Burks’s workshop-based design practice and offers an opportunity to reflect on the potential of design at a time when racial, social, and environmental justice remain in jeopardy. Topics explored in the book include an overview of the designer’s practice, from the foundational architecture culture of Chicago (Burks’s birthplace) to his latest speculative project; the workshop-based collaborative ethos of his studio, Stephen Burks Man Made; and the politics of design. In the conversation between bell hooks and Burks, hooks brings her critical eye to design as it relates to the broader field of African American cultural production.Distributed for the High Museum of ArtExhibition Schedule:High Museum of Art, Atlanta(September 16, 2022–March 5, 2023)Philadelphia Museum of Art(November 19, 2023–April 14, 2024)

A major retrospective offers a new perspective on the work of Noguchi, whose remarkable design and artistic legacy encompasses sculpture, lighting, furniture, ceramics, public plazas, and garden design.As part of its 100th anniversary celebrations in 2026, the High Museum of Art is launching an exhibition and accompanying catalogue, which together explore the extraordinary sixty-year career of influential artist and designer Isamu Noguchi. Next year is also the fiftieth anniversary of Playscapes, a Noguchi-designed playground located just a few blocks from the museum. Though Noguchi claimed he was not a designer, the High Museum approaches his work through the design lens, bringing to light many potently prescient and under-explored aspects of his practice. Noguchi exemplified the interdisciplinary, social-minded approach to the role of artist-designer, and his never-ending search for modes of expression reflected an unusually expansive view that extended across everything from sculpture, furniture, and lighting to landscapes, stage sets, and kitchen timers.This comprehensive volume features more than twenty in-depth essays and shorter vignettes by an impressive international roster of scholars and curators, addressing all aspects of Noguchi’s design practice. In addition, a rich and diverse selection of more than 250 archival and contemporary images depict the works in the exhibition as well as illuminate and expand on Noguchi’s exceptional career.Essential reading for Noguchi fans, this book also appeals to lovers of modern art, mid-twentieth-century architecture and design, and the creative ethos that imbues everything Noguchi.

Matson’s fabric works unite painterly abstraction, digital technology and textile tactilityWorking within a renewed interest in craft practices, Los Angeles–based artist Christy Matson (born 1979) creates woven pictures that explore memory and imagination through the layered history of textile production, while advocating for issues surrounding sustainability. Her abstract, constantly evolving compositions resemble paintings, and yet they are deeply rooted in textile history. Using a digital jacquard loom together with the language of historic weaving techniques, Matson honors the centuries-old craft while also embracing a new approach to technology. Her works allow viewers to engage with textiles of the past in thoughtful, innovative ways. A continuation of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Currents series, which highlights new trends in contemporary art, this volume brings together nearly 50 of Matson’s most recent works from the last five years, and is the first publication to explore Matson's wide-ranging textile art.

This is the first volume to document and contextualize Sonya Clark’s large-scale, collaborative artworks. These projects demonstrate Clark’s career-long commitment to addressing the urgent issue of racial inequality in American society and her philosophy of creatively engaging the viewer in reflection on the nation’s history of slavery and our roles in dismantling systemic racism today.As an extension of her abiding commitment to issues of history, race, and reconciliation in her work, Clark is also distinctive as an artist for her use of textiles and other everyday materials, which she aligns with the intertwined histories of art and craft. For marginalized people (African Americans and women, in particular) handwork has been essential to survival and consequently has functioned, and continues to function, as an important means of creating a group identity. Hence, for Clark, craft is essential to the question of equality.

Alexander Girard’s Imagined Worlds examines a modern design luminary whose collection of global folk art and vernacular forms informed his expansive design practice. The book focuses on the Museum of International Folk Art, its displays and archival collections, and Girard’s Santa Fe years, as a locus for the designer-collector’s wide-ranging practices. From his home and studio in Santa Fe, Alexander Girard’s work had international reach and profoundly impacted modern design. Lavishly illustrated, this book explores through thoughtful essays new facets of Girard’s design production and folk art collection, underscoring the inseparability of the two and culminating in his exhibition Multiple Visions: A Common Bond at the Museum of International Folk Art. By reflecting on selected displays, providing cultural context and highlighting artists and traditions, the publication offers new ways of approaching Girard’s legacy. Published in conjunction with the long-term installation of Multiple Visions: A Common Bond, the Girard Wing, Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe. Multiple Visions: The folk art and toy collections of architect and designer Alexander Girard (1907–1993) – including unpublished photographs of his final designed environment.

Focusing on the extensive influence of Scandinavian design in the United States, this book shows how Nordic ideas about modern design and the objects themselves had an indelible impact on American culture and material life. It also considers America’s influence on Scandinavian design, showing how cultural exchange is mutual by nature. In addition to familiar material like Danish furniture and Swedish glass, readers will learn about America’s little-known “Viking Revival” style; the work of Howard Smith, an African-American artist who immigrated to Finland in the 1960s; and the myriad ways Scandinavian toys and household goods helped shape American child-rearing practices. The perfect addition to any Danish modern coffee table, this elegant book traces how Scandinavian design became an integral part of what is considered “American design.”

The Art Institute of Chicago is home to one of the world's finest collections of American folk art. For Kith and Kin provides an introduction to that collection through more than sixty of its most outstanding objects. Selected by premier American art scholar Judith A. Barter, the majority of these objects have never before been published.In a groundbreaking opening essay, Barter revisits the earliest days of folk-art collecting in Chicago, beginning in the 1890s. She pays special attention to the passionate individuals who sought out unique and expressive examples of American folk art, building private collections that they later donated to the Art Institute. Including beautiful reproductions and detailed entries for each of the sixty-one objects it features, this book highlights an array of masterworks such as "primitive" New England portraits, a face jug from South Carolina, New Mexican ceramics, a weathervane, and ship figureheads.Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago