After working for two decades in the realm of handcrafted sculpture, furniture and installations, designer David Wiseman (born 1981) has created a signature palette of various mediums. The unique mastery of these materials prepared Wiseman to embark on the largest and most cohesive exercise of his imagination thus far: a Gesamtkunstwerk in a Hong Kong apartment comprising of screens, furnishings, lighting, wall and floor treatments. Designed in conversation with two of Monet’s Water Lilies paintings held by the owner, the multidimensional space weaves motifs from the renowned Giverny gardens with ancient Chinese mythological narratives. This publication traces the journey of . . . .go to book page >>

R & Company’s landmark triennial exhibition and accompanying publication, Objects: USA, returns in 2024, featuring 55 makers from across the United States whose works blur the traditionally understood boundaries of art, design and craft. The exhibition’s curators and the book’s authors, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy and Kellie Riggs, have organized these works into archetypes that engage with makers’ intentions and driving interests rather than categories related to medium, proposing a new conceptual framework for understanding 21st-century objecthood. The book includes a preface by R & Company principals Evan Snyderman and Zesty Meyers, an introduction by curator Glenn Adamson, an essay by the . . . .go to book page >>

For American experimental theater stage director and playwright Robert Wilson (born 1941), theater is a totality of visual, textual and performative mediums. Wilson has incorporated furniture designs into his scenography since his earliest productions in the 1960s. In almost all of my plays, there is a chair specially designed, he said. Often, the chairs are much like an actor. Wilson’s chairs, with their frequently referential names (the Kafka Chair, Queen Victoria Chairs, the Mondrian Chair), assume expanded significance as the surviving artifacts of each performance.
The works in this publication range from 1969 to 2011, from the stainless steel mesh Parzival Sofa (1987) to the painted wood Clementine Hunter Rocker (2011). Wilson’s practice as a designer is illuminated by . . . .go to book page >>

Although known primarily as a Western landscape photographer, Mark Ruwedel (born 1954) has acknowledged that he fits somewhere in between” a host of sometimes competing, sometimes complementary inspirations. Ruwedel has cited a highly varied range of artistic influences: 19th-century photographers such as Carleton Watkins; 1970s New Topographics photographers such as Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams; Earthworks artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer; and even the Surrealists Man Ray and André Breton.
Ruwedel's one-of-a-kind handmade and limited-edition artist's books—most from the Stanford Libraries’ Special Collections—are thought-provoking and often humorous visual essays on his inspirations and influences. Shown together for the . . . .go to book page >>