Art + Furniture: Designers, Makers, and Advocates
Curated by Thomas Mellins and Donald Albrecht, the show opens September 25, 2026, at the New York School of Interior Design and highlights 20 artists who redefined furniture as art.
’Round the World by Richard Snyder
Photo credit: Matthew Gordon. Courtesy of Superhouse and Richard Snyder.
Curated by Thomas Mellins and Donald Albrecht, the exhibition Art + Furniture: Designers, Makers, and Advocates will be presented in the New York School of Interior Design Gallery from September 25, 2026 through April 2, 2027. The show will explore the art and studio furniture movements’ origins, contributions, and legacies in the closing decades of the 20th century. Intentionally blurring the distinction between fine art and useful objects, as well as between design and craft, the artists featured challenged traditional ways of exhibiting and selling work, giving rise to a new generation of gallerists and entrepreneurs.
They embraced a bold concept of what furniture could be. At the same time, they responded to the city they called home. New York in the late 1970s was a metropolis in crisis. Yet with adversity came a positive edge: avant-garde art, music, fashion, and design flourished. Amidst challenges to modernist “good taste,” many artists and craftspeople flocked to New York’s formerly industrial SoHo neighborhood, attracted to its atmosphere of artistic freedom, as well as to its commodious and comparatively affordable live/work spaces.
Furniture, related objects, and photographs of 20 artists will be showcased in the exhibition, including Donald Judd, Wendell Castle, Dakota Jackson, and Michele Oka Doner as well as artists less well known to the public but critical to the movements including Elizabeth Browning Jackson, Rafael Barrios, Jim Cole, Thomas Hucker, Laura Johnson Drake, Dan Friedman, James Hong, Alex Locadia, Main+ Main, Terence Main, Wendy Maruyama, Howard Meister Forrest Myers and Richard Snyder.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a book of the same title, created and edited by Dennis Miller, an historian of the movements, with an introduction by the curators. Studio Joseph will design the exhibition. Poleschuk Design will produce the show.
Burning Bush by Michele Oka Doner
Photo credit: Matthew Gordon. Courtesy of Superhouse and Michele Oka Doner.
Frond Chair 7 by Terence Main
Photo credit: ©EMILIE_BALTZ for Magen H Gallery.
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About the Curators
Thomas Mellins has written extensively about New York City’s architecture and urbanism. He also has curated exhibitions for such cultural institutions as the New York Public Library and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Donald Albrecht creates exhibitions, books, and essays, often for public institutions, that explore a wide range of topics from broad overviews of cultural trends to in-depth profiles of visual and performing artists.