Barcelona can have their Gaudi, Philadelphia has Zagar!  Isaiah Zagar is a mosaic artist with a single-minded obsession - covering every surface with his ceramic tile and glass designs.  Zagar began tiling the grounds and walls of the property next to his studio in 1994.  Several tunnels, grottoes, and years later, we have the Magic [...]

This summer the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design is hosting a transformational exhibit, in which four California artists will be creating installations that are “intended as encompassing experiences.” It’s a large-scale exhibit and, the museum promises, will bring a visual transformation to the museum.
You can see the artists at work creating their installations [...]

Making art is one of those jobs that for the most part goes unseen—we see the results in museums and galleries, but it’s rare that we get to actually see the artist at work, never mind to be able to ask questions about everything from process to production.
But the Museum of Art and Design has [...]

There is one museum in the USA devoted solely to contemporary and historic design: the Cooper-Hewitt in New York City, and this week marks the opening of this year’s National Design Triennial exhibit, which was created to seek out the very best and most innovative in contemporary design.
The exhibit includes design ideas from the worlds [...]

In her earliest childhood days, Nina Nguyen was fascinated by her uncle’s goldsmithing work in his casting foundry in Vietnam. Today, she designs her own jewlery line in Florida, using semiprevcious stones, and creates elegant, artistic pieces, like that shown here. The pieces are then produced by skilled artisans in the Nina Nguyen Design Women’s [...]

MAD or Museum of Arts and Design in New York is presenting an upcoming exhibition on organic living things.  Several artists transform what was once alive into creative art and sculptures.  In the exhibit, Dead or Alive, artists use skeletons, plant materials, feathers, and other fauna to create statements about their environment.
The artists include Jennifer [...]

MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, has recently opened their Architecture and Design Galleries, and is currently showing the exhibit, Shaping Modernity, 1880-1990.
The exhibit examines the iconic objects that helped shape the modern age starting with the Art Nouveau age in 1880s up to 1990.  On our cover is a 1964 [...]

This past Thursday I took advantage of Target’s generosity and paid a (free) visit to MOCA, the Museum of Chinese in America on Centre Street. I did not realize before my visit that the museum’s address is fairly new, and that it is now housed in an exquisitely-realized space by (Chinese-American) architect Maya Lin.
Out of [...]

…we do. Is it wood or is it fabric?  It’s a bit of both. This German designer, Elisa Strozyk, has come up with a way to combine very thin veneers with fabrics; the result is this fabric that looks like wood. Kudos to Strozyk for her terrific imagination and her eagerness to see the world [...]

If you saw my previous post on the Bauhaus exhibit at MOMA (or if you scroll down to it now) you’ll see that MOMA has this terrific extravaganza of all things Bauhaus—paintings, sculpture, furniture, weaving, hands-on-workshops. Everything but a beer garden.
Not only that, but right uptown, at the Guggenheim Museum, there is a huge Kandinsky [...]