Bloomcraft Fabrics, a New York-based producer of woven textiles that collaborated with artists ranging from Rockwell Kent to Gloria Vanderbilt, released the Picasso Collection in 1963. As announced by an advertisement in American Fabrics: “This unusual collection links the work of the world’s greatest living painter and the world of interior design through a series...
In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. The Oka chair, by Michele Oka Doner, is both a utilitarian furnishing and a highly detailed sculptural piece. The chair’s seat is a flat textured disk which rests on straight, unadorned legs. The back, where all the...
In 1953, Dan Fuller, president of Fuller Fabrics, invited five of the 20th century’s most distinguished artists: Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, and Raoul Dufy, to collaborate on a line of textiles to be called the Modern Master Series. The concept was unique in that the artists were not commissioned to produce...
In 1953, Dan Fuller, president of Fuller Fabrics, invited five of the twentieth century’s most distinguished artists—Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, and Raoul Dufy—to collaborate on a line of textiles to be called the Modern Master Series. The concept was unique in that the artists were not commissioned to produce original patterns...
This headscarf is one of a series known as the Ascher Squares, produced as part of an historic collaboration between Ascher Studios, an haute couture textile company in London, and more than fifty modern artists, including Henry Moore, Jean Cocteau, Alexander Calder, and painter André Derain, who designed the headscarf featured here. Ascher Studios gave...
John Rombola (b. 1933 ), a Brooklyn-born artist, has always marched to the beat of his own whimsical rhythm. And fittingly so, when radio station WPaT, which also moved to its own rhythm, commissioned Rombola to provide illustrations for its 1963 advertising campaign “In the Air Everywhere,” to be displayed in subway cars across New...
The image of the painter in his studio is a popular and common visual theme from the early modern period to the present. This particular cartouche, designed by Jacques de Lajoüe, shows a painter with the tools of his trade arranged in the form of a cartouche (a type of an ornamental frame). With the...
Teens from around the city joined us for a two-day product-design workshop led by instructor Julia Chiang. It was an unexpected design medium for sure – candy! Julia Chiang uses a wide variety of materials in her sculpture and installations, including nostalgic and sweet ring pops. Chiang is known for her use of the colorful...
This is the seventh in a series of posts about my new book, Designing Media DJ Spooky, AKA Paul D. Miller, October 2009 Paul Miller may seem a less interesting name than DJ Spooky: That Subliminal Kid, but he makes up for it with his erudite conversation, informed by his background in philosophy and French...
