During the last decade, Gaetano Pesce, long known for his varied designs and sense of experimentation, turned his attention to the creation of jewelry. Throughout his career Pesce has used resin to create such diverse objects as furniture, vases and shoes. Experimenting further, Pesce sought to create jewelry with this highly adaptable medium. To date,...

Felieke van der Leest’s Grey Heron Airplane ring is full of the whimsy which is an integral component of the artist’s imaginative and sophisticated design process, which incorporates techniques such as bead weaving and crocheting. This ring, like much of Van der Leest’s work, focuses on the use of mass produced toy animals, highlighted by...

This pitcher was manufactured by Rookwood Pottery, an American art pottery company founded in Cincinnati, Ohio. Rookwood was begun by Maria Longworth Nichols in 1880 after she was enamored of the Japanese ceramics on view at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. Nichols originally proposed to her father that they bring a Japanese pottery—“workmen...

For more than a decade, Dutch designer Joris Laarman and his team at Joris Laarman Lab have been looking to nature for information and inspiration. As he writes in the newly published book Joris Laarman Lab, “our digital age makes it possible to not just use nature as a stylistic reference, but to actually use the...

This button, from a set of nine, offers the viewer a chance to peek into the age of Enlightenment, a period of time when the human mind was breaking free from the constraints of the Church and the limitations of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance, primarily spanning the fifteenth through sixteenth centuries, is often thought...

The Enignum Free Form Chair by Joseph Walsh curves, swirls and ripples in a manner that is reminiscent of furniture from the Art Nouveau period, yet it is contemporary in its overall aesthetic. Joseph Walsh, a self-taught designer and builder, started working with wood at the age of eight, and honed both his woodworking skill...

Michael Izrael Galmer was born in 1947 in the former Soviet Union, living there through much of the Cold War. Despite the difficulty of these years, Galmer attended Moscow University, earning a Ph.D. in physics while pursuing his interests in drawing, painting and sculpture, looking to nature for inspiration. As a student, he did not...

This beautiful birdcage comprised of glass, brass and plexiglass was designed by Charles Lin Tissot. Although best known for his domestic glassware designed for Steuben, this birdcage from the Glass Gardens collection is an escape to a realm of fantasy. This birdcage was produced during the years that Tissot collaborated with the Venini glassworks in...

René Lalique was one of the most versatile jewelry artists working in the twentieth century, in that he was equally successful in two periods of design history. Lalique created both luxurious one-off pieces for fashionable ladies during the art nouveau period and also successfully created mass-produced glass pieces in the style moderne. Lauded during the...