Hasta La Ideas

We asked writer Nancy Lazarus to throw herself into the New York Ceramics Fair. Here’s her well-sculpted roundup:

Rainbow Luster Bowl (2006), made by Haggerty Ceramics.

“With the resurgence now of porcelain and ceramics, it’s not old-fashioned love, it’s eternal love,” said designer Alexa Hampton, who was joined by fellow designers and ceramics lovers Kitty Hawks and David Scott on a panel co-sponsored by the New York School of Interior Design at the New York Ceramics Fair, held last week in the Grand Ballroom of the Bohemian National Hall.

Museum exhibits devoted to ceramics have also heralded the medium’s revival, including recent and upcoming shows at New York’s Museum of Art and Design and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ceramics have a long history, alternately associated with ancient rituals, children’s crafts classes, and hippies, but haven’t always been perceived in high regard.

Ceramics are now recognized as a multi-dimensional art form, as the designers pointed out. “One of the beautiful aspects of ceramics is its deep, entrenched history of usefulness,” noted Hampton, adding that one can delve into ceramics in interiors or in doses by being a collector.

Both Scott and Hawks are ceramics collectors, and Scott described the pursuit of such objects as a compulsion. Still, he noted that not every piece has to be precious. Hawks agreed that provenance is not always necessary and said ceramics preferences and tastes can be quirky.
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Aspiring architects, urban planners in training, and underachieving dictators, take note: the crafty types at Paper Punk have created a kit “that allows anyone to build the city of their dreams with a few simple folds.” Behold Urban Fold, a box full of punch-n-fold shapes, stickers, and more. We asked Paper Punk founder Grace Hawthorne—an artist, author, and educator who heads up the Creative Gym course at Stanford’s d.school—to tell us more about this paper-block city project, which is up for backing (and buying) on Kickstarter through December 2.

(Photo: Matthias Heiderich)

How did you get the idea for Urban Fold?
Urban Fold is a modern take on old-school wooden blocks. I was inspired by this photo (above) by Matthias Heiderich and graffiti I spied in Berlin last year. Not many construction/building activities go beyond solid or primary colors. I wanted to create an urban-minded build/play experience that was also eye-candy, just impossible to resist because it’s bursting with colors, patterns, cool graphics…so fun-looking that you impulsively want to touch and play with it.

How is this different from previous Paper Punk projects?
Urban Fold is Paper Punk’s first boxed set. Unlike our other offerings, it comes packaged in a handsome oversized storage box and has does not include adhesive dots in the set. The intention is for the user to punch-out shapes, fold all the blocks, customize with the 697 provided stickers, build/play, put away in the storage box, bring out and customize/build/play again, etc. I refer it to an open box set because there are so many pieces to it and what anyone can create with it is only bounded by their imagination. All our kits provide open play opportunities, but Urban Fold takes it to a whole new level. We can’t wait till users show us all the crazy cool things they’ll make with Urban Fold.
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A cut above. The title page for the Signature Shakespeare edition of Romeo and Juliet, illustrated with hand-cut paper artwork by Kevin Stanton.

Kevin Stanton remembers the first time he picked up an X-Acto knife. “In an introductory Chinese class I once took, I obsessively chose the hardest pattern for a cut-paper project we did out of construction paper,” he says. “I was struck by how detailed I could be with that knife.” He ended up with a fish that shimmered with painstakingly cut scales and a taste for slicing paper, a technique he returned to during his freshman year at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. “I’d done a portrait in small strips of color-aid for my LCD class that was ridiculously meticulous, and I’m convinced the only reason I passed my drawing class was because my drawing professor liked it so much.”

Now a few years out of Pratt (he graduated in 2010 with a BFA in communications design), Stanton has honed his knife skills to the point that Sterling Publishing enlisted him to illustrate several volumes of its Signature Shakespeare series with his hand-cut paper artwork, which is reproduced in all its multi-dimensional glory in laser-cut tip-ins and scans. On Saturday, Stanton will be among the mix of established and emerging artists and designers participating in Pratt’s annual Alumni Art and Design Fair, where books, accessories, jewelry, paintings, and photography by more than 40 Pratt alumni will be up for sale. We asked Stanton to tell us about the process of taking a blade to the Bard, his experience at Pratt, and what he’ll turn his sharp eye (and sharp edges) to next.

What was your process like for illustrating new editions of the Shakespeare classics?
The process for the Shakespeare classics started with large lists of ideas for spot illustrations that were put together by Sterling’s Shakespeare expert (a Columbia professor, I believe). Then a ton of thumbnails and discussions about colors and sketches and ideas and revisions. Then better sketches and revisions. And basically by the end, I had two weeks to finish both pairs of books! It was crazy, but amazing.

What was the most challenging aspect of this project?
The sheer quantity of illustrations with the time, I think. But working with a group of people brings its own challenges too, but I think we cobbled something special together so it was worth it!
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The W New York Hotel Union Square helped ICFF celebrate its 25th anniversary with an exotic installation imported from Spain. We equipped writer Nancy Lazarus with castanets and sent her out into the sultry night.

(Photos courtesy W Hotel Union Square)

Wanda Barcelona is heading back to Spain with many new fans. The design firm, which specializes in “paper dreams, ephemeral architecture, and creative spaces,” created “Fantastico” (above) for display at the W New York Union Square during ICFF. The enormous yet graceful wooden fan with intricate paper cutouts celebrated the history of furniture design, the Spanish “language of the hand fan,” and the recently completed renovation of the W hotel property.

During a Monday evening event at the hotel, the trio from Wanda Barcelona (below) was on hand to shed light on their fantasy construction, created with the support of Interiors from Spain. Inti Velez, the firm’s architect, said the fan structure was inspired by the way “high-society Spanish girls used to communicate with their lovers during Spanish colonial times.” For example, fanning very quickly meant they were engaged. Velez noted that it reminds him of today’s rapid text-message exchanges.

The name “Fantastico” not only conveys hand fans and fantasy, but also translates well into English, Spanish, and other Romance languages, noted Dani Mancini, the firm’s designer. He said they used white along with gold accents to “capture the feeling of elegance and to fit well into the new décor of the W Hotel’s lobby.”
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“I want this year to be the year of the DIY gadget maker. People who have really good ideas should be able to find a way to fund them through Kickstarter and other sites. OK Go’s style is very DIY. We make our own videos; we make our own records. In the beginning, our videos were made for next to nothing, but we were able to put them out there and anyone with a computer and access to the Internet could watch them. I like that style of making–just having a good idea and letting people decide whether they like or not.”

–Tim Nordwind, bassist for OK Go and Pyramids, in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal

OK Go’s most recent video, “Needing/Getting”:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.