Displaying items by tag: materials

Connoisseurs of Vermont antiques have long sought to dispel notions that the furniture is rustic, and that the makers were eccentrics living on the edges of the wilderness. In the last few decades, historians and collectors have unearthed evidence that the state’s early woodworkers, even those farming in remote spots, kept up with trends in design, materials and tools. An exhibition surveying these sophisticated pieces, “Rich and Tasty: Vermont Furniture to 1850,” opens on July 25 at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.

Museums are increasingly displaying jewelry as a form of wearable art in its own right, sometimes with the conversation centering around the innovative use of materials in alternative ways.

“Jewelry is more than just you wear to complement your clothes. If you pick good jewelry, it’s like wearing a piece of art,” says Ulysses Dietz, curator of the exhibition, titled "From Pearls to Platinum to Plastic," opening at the Newark Museum in June.

There is a widespread assumption that plastic is among the hardiest of materials, but that is far from true, as conservators in museums and galleries know only too well.

The Victoria & Albert Museum is now collaborating with Imperial College and University College London to find ways of saving 20th-century works of art and design featuring plastics, including polyester and polyurethane.

Part of Alexander McQueen’s genius and enduring influence on fashion was his constant pushing of boundaries, both through construction of clothes, and the usage of unconventional materials in making them. His fascination with birds, which began in his boyhood, extended into his professional oeuvre, manifested in ethereal and fantastical couture collections that subverted ideas of weight, structure, and conventional beauty. Yet his mastery at tailoring was equally evident in even the most unadorned of garments, with jackets cut severely to emphasize various parts of the body, and extremely low-cut trousers aptly named “bumsters.”

On Tuesday, December 2, 2014, leading interior designer Suzanne Lovell served as guest speaker at DigitasLBi’s inaugural “Ideas Convection” event in Chicago. DigitasLBi, a global marketing and technology agency with an office in the heart of the city’s business district, launched the monthly event to promote the flow of new ideas from leaders working in creative fields such as architecture, design, and technology.

Lovell presented her lecture to Team Whirlpool, a group of seventy-five creatives and advertising executives working on the Whirlpool Brands campaign, which includes Whirlpool, Jenn-Air, KitchenAid, and Maytag. Using thoughtfully curated images from her firm’s portfolio of completed projects, Lovell explained the influence that her design work has on culture. She proceeded to walk Team Whirlpool through her design process, touching on the art, architecture, and materials that inspire and inform her classic yet decidedly modern interiors.

A black flag emblazoned with the word ZERO hangs outside the museum, less ominous than classically revolutionary. Inside, a projection screen in the rotunda shows selections of films and printed matter from the exhibition upstairs. The signature image is a rocket launch, a perfect expression of the technologically inflected postwar optimism that defines the German art group Zero and the larger “Zero network” of like-minded artists, whose members hailed from various Western European capitals (and included outliers from America and Japan). Taken together, their work reveals a shared preoccupation with natural processes, everyday materials, plays of light and texture, and moving parts, both optical and mechanical.

“ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s,” which fills all six floors of the Guggenheim through January 7, 2015, was clearly an ambitious undertaking by Guggenheim curator Valerie Hillings (it is Zero’s first major museum survey in the United States). The group’s core members — Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, who met as students in Düsseldorf in 1959, and Günther Uecker, who joined them in ’61 — are relatively established figures, but less is known about their collaborative work and connections to the larger European scene.