On November 14, 1665, the Basilica of San Domenico in Bologna was crowded with mourners. They were gathered to remember a young female artist, Elisabetta Sirani (1638 – 1665), who had died suddenly the previous August.[1] Although only 27 at the time of her death, Elisabetta was already an acclaimed painter, draftsman, and printmaker—a contemporary...
Written by Steven Landau As a company of designers and producers of tactile maps and models, Touch Graphics, Inc. usually focuses on products that communicate spatial information through the sense of touch for use by visually impaired students and museum visitors. Occasionally, the company develops tools to support blind artists and scientists. One of our...
Café from the Service des Objets de Dessert, dated 1819-20, was drawn by Jean-Charles Develly as part of a table service for the Royal Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory. The factory was founded in Vincennes in 1740 and later relocated to Sèvres in 1756. In 1800, Alexandre Brongniart (1770–1847) was chosen as the administrator of the factory...
Elegant contrast is the defining characterstic of Korean sculptor, artist, and furniture designer Byung Hoon Choi’s body of work. This delicate black ink and gray wash drawing is no exception. The opposing forms, textures, and colors of the two geometries in this preparatory sketch for a bench produce a meditative composition echoed in Choi’s final...
Gail Davidson discusses modernist designer Ilonka Karasz's geometric iterations for tableware.
In tandem with her artistic practice, Sheila Hicks has been engaged with the fields of architecture, design, and textile industry for over 50 years. Sketching Air is Hick’s latest commercial collaboration. Working with Momentum Textiles, she has created a collection of five patterned weaves (Sketching Air, Mapping Ideas, Painting Strokes, Drawing Lines, and Crossing Colors)...
This design for a vegetable dish, now on view in The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s, blends classical forms with modern decorative details.
This figure study of a nude male depicted from the rear in contrapposto, bears the geometric massing and imperfect proportions of the work of a student. Made in 1957, the drawing is a vestige of the collegiate days of renowned artist Eva Hesse (b. Hamburg, 1936-1970). From 1954-1957, Hesse was a student at the Cooper Union...
LIFE magazine deemed him as a “dressmaker in silver” in 1939, but Tommi Parzinger was an incredibly versatile designer, celebrated for his furniture, wallpaper, packaging and textiles.[1] Parzinger designed furnishings for socialites, decorators, and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and the Rockefellers and he established himself as a man about town in the glamorous circles of...
