Inquisitive viewers will take a look behind the sculptures. Their wall-facing side has been painted a corrosive shade of orange, which, when placed between the gallery’s blank white walls and blindingly white LEDs, is reflected onto the gallery’s walls as a faint glow. But taking this fateful look is to lose the magic. More likely than not, you’ll long for how new and unknown this phenomenon felt a few seconds ago. It’s all in vanity, the gig is up now. The glow is not a glow but a mere effect of the light. It’s a lie. Yet most viewers will find themselves suspending their disbelief and viewing the forms head-on once more. No question about it: with the painted surface out of sight, they’re once again glowing. Why choose to be fooled by an illusion when you know the source of its trickery? Who knows. Most illusions aren’t this beautiful. Read the full review here.

“Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place” features works from the past 10 years that came out of Burks’ highly collaborative design practice. He often collaborates with craft artisans around the world, particularly weavers in the Philippines and Senegal who inspired Dala, a line of woven outdoor furniture from the Dedon company. Burks’ design ethos is to integrate handcraft into industrial manufacturing. Read the full article here.

Tanya Aguiñiga

Tanya Aguiñiga is a Los Angeles based artist, designer and craftsperson whose work includes large-scale woven installations for museum and gallery spaces and interior design projects, intricately woven objects and artworks, and furniture that blends modernist design concepts with earthy, feminine or indigenous references. At the core of her practice however, is a consistent connection to community, to her roots, as well as with those around her. Read the full article here.

In the dining room of a Victorian home in Louisville’s bohemian Highlands neighborhood, Stephen Reily is surrounded by art. A slender man who speaks with graceful authority, he is pointing out the room’s playful baroque, goth wall­paper. Beside him looms a stack of resin boxes designed by the North Carolina native Sam Stewart, 15 in all. Each one backlit by the mid­afternoon sun, they grow smaller in their climb toward the ceiling. Read the full article here.

In 2017, L.A.-based artist Natalie M. Godinez, who works with textiles and printmaking, was in the process of refining her artistic practice. She wanted to expand on storytelling through art. Then, after collaborating with several artist workshops with AMBOS, a collective founded by artist Tanya Aguiñiga, Godinez had a breakthrough.

Through the hands-on classes, Godinez was surprised to find herself connecting with her own lineage, as someone who grew up on the U.S.-Mexico border, in Tijuana. She wasn’t alone: In the workshops, fellow artists were eager to share more about how the process of craft had unlocked something for them too. Read the full article here.

Burks, whose first spirit house was commissioned by the High Museum of Art for his solo exhibition “Shelter In Place” earlier this year, draws on West African and Asian traditions to portray the dead as active contributors to our daily lives—a belief central to many non-Western cultures. These traditions, including Buddhism and the Yoruba practice of Ifá, highlight the deep integration of religion in every aspect of life—from the political to the social, cultural, and personal. Through rituals involving offerings and prayers at altars, people can experience a divine presence, a concept known as Asé in the Yoruba tradition, which infuses these human-made objects with spiritual life and power. Read the full review here.

Last year, industrial designer Stephen Burks debuted his first modern altar, ‘Spirit House’, at the High Museum of Art, for his exhibition ‘Stephen Burks: Shelter In Place’. Now, a year on, he reveals his latest exhibition, ‘Spirit Houses’, at Chicago’s Volume Gallery. Read the full review here.

Tanya Aguiñiga is known for her community-based projects and activism that involve interactions at the border. This comic is part of a series Drawn to Art: Tales of Inspiring Women Artists that illuminates the stories of women artists in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Inspired by graphic novels, these short takes on artists’ lives were each drawn by a student-illustrator from the Ringling College of Art and Design. We invite you to read the comic and share it with your friends and young people in your life. View the entire comic here.

Tanya Aguiñiga is a Los Angeles-based artist, designer, and activist who grew up as a binational citizen of Mexico and the United States. Much of her work speaks of her divided identity and tells the larger and often invisible stories of the transnational community. She shares her Brief But Spectacular take on using craft to push back on injustice for our arts and culture series, CANVAS. Watch the full video here.

Between animal, plant and fungus, it becomes hard to tell the difference: Jack Craig’s furniture collection seems to have a life of its own. Created primarily out of melted carpet, the work is soft and fuzzy—and it passively invites interaction. Craig, a former electrical engineer who worked on stealth technology for the U.S. Navy before he pivoted into the world of industrial design, is fascinated by altering familiar materials in unexpected ways. His process is about transformation and regeneration. Breathing new life into material that is often discarded or overlooked—in this case, carpet—he first melts it and then proceeds to sculpt it into extravagantly grotesque furniture and fantastical design objects—from chairs and mirrors to coffee tables and vases. Read full review here.

Tanya Aguiñiga knows a thing or two about living in flux. From the age of four, each morning at 3.30am, she travelled across the US-Mexico border from her home in Tijuana to her school in San Diego. ‘It’s crazy, logistically. But it’s also crazy, psychologically and emotionally,’ she tells me via Zoom from her LA studio, with off-white fibre works dangling from the half-moon wall behind her. ‘At the time, kind of similar to now, there were massive amounts of migrants at the border up against the fence trying to get to the US side. We had to navigate pretty difficult experiences on our way. There was incredible desperation on the faces of adults, and as a child, it’s super difficult to deal with.’ Read the full profile here.

Working in an even older medium, Jennefer Hoffmann’s stoneware works, at Volume Gallery, are totems that take on a ritualistic aura. Their tiered structures suggest a utility lost in history while their capstones—an eye, an orange ball, a mass of lumps—further heighten the mystery. Read the full article here.

At first glance, Tanya Aguiñiga’s “Swallowing Dirt” seems to gesture to the phantasmagoric. Her spectral rope and terra-cotta sculptures fill Volume Gallery, suspended from the walls and ceiling. The figures ostensibly depict the uncanny body, which produces our premature illusory response. But under closer examination, Aguiñiga’s sculptures are corporeal. She threads together her two material disciplines to create a series of haunting forms that concretize when we approach them. 

“Swallowing Dirt” features eight unconventional portraits—sculptures that reimagine the immaterial “self” as tactile. The two ostensibly incompatible mediums—ceramic and fiber—twine together to create haunting figures. The terra-cotta and off-loom weaving blend together in an homage to Aguiñiga’s Mexican heritage. Emotional Body I spills from the gallery wall, engulfing a series of terra-cotta hands immersed in the rope sculpture. Similarly, the wall-hung Internal Body II holds terra-cotta internal organs within its fiber “belly.” Aguiñiga ventures to explore the esoteric, hanging Metaphysical Body II from the ceiling to create a hauntingly inviting display. Read the full review here.

The artist has a long history of weaving and working within (and beyond) traditional craft techniques. She adds layers in the form of meaningful materials that nod to her Mexican heritage. Think reddish-brown ceramics, clay and natural fibers. The outcome is a heavily textured work that feels tactile—soft and powerful at once.

Another major influence on Aguiñiga’s artistic and activism practice: her childhood. The Los Angeles-based artist was raised in Tijuana, and had to cross the border daily as a child to attend school in San Diego. This binational experience has proved incredibly formative of her perspective and has heavily impacted her life and career. To this day, this memory still feels fresh. Read the full review here.

In “Swallowing Dirt,” Los Angeles–based artist Tanya Aguiñiga’s fifth show at Volume Gallery, weavings hang in place of the human body and suggest elements of an artist’s specific human experience. With textile sculptures suspended both from the ceiling and hung on the wall, Aguiñiga stretches what can be considered a portrait by incorporating vaguely human elements (like terra-cotta hands and internal organs) into forms that feel sentient and static in equal parts. Most of the work is constructed with cotton rope, some of it dyed with terra-cotta, while fired terra-cotta elements are woven in. Her bodies are also doorways, referencing a childhood spent crossing the border between Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego daily, and form a bridge between her artistic concerns and her work as an activist. The show is wonderfully refreshing and impressive in scale. Read the full article here.

Chicago’s Volume Gallery presents Swallowing Dirt, a solo show by award-winning artist, activist, and craftsperson Tanya Aguiñiga. The LA-based multitalent’s latest works are conceived as unconventional portraits—symbolic abstractions of the human experience incorporating cotton rope weavings and ceramic renditions of body parts—and a continuation of her investigations into identity, place, and craft. Raised in Tijuana Mexico, Aguiñiga crossed the border daily as a child to attend school in San Diego, and her binational experience continues to influence her practice today. By using clay from Mexico and the US, Aguiñiga addresses issues such as colonization, commodification, and ownership of land. Til June 17. Read more here.

The Knoll Pavilion at Salone del Mobile 2023 divulges how Olivares plans to bring the brand into the modern age. Designed by Kersten Geers and David Van Severen of Office KGDVS, the dynamic aluminium and glass structure showcases Knoll’s new launches alongside artworks by Jonathan Muecke, inspired by some of the Harry Bertoia artworks that were commissioned by Florence Knoll for her first showrooms. Read more here.

On behalf of the Chicago Architectural Club and in partnership with the Design Museum Chicago, we are pleased to announce that for the eight edition of the Chicago Architectural Club’s Emerging Visions Competition, the 2023 selected winner is Abigail Chang.  In keeping with the mission of this program, the Chicago Architectural Club has partnered with the Design Museum Chicago who is sharing their space to provide a public forum for Abigail’s work to be recognized.  Please save the date for Abigail Chang’s exhibition opening and lecture event hosted at the Design Museum Chicago on Tuesday, April 11th at 6pm.  

“Color is the most relative medium in art,” according to Josef Albers. Its relativity, along with the subjective nature of visual perception, forms the basis of the immersive light installations that comprise “Exact Dutch Yellow,” the most recent exhibition of Chicago-based collaborative Luftwerk (Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero), who transformed the fourth-floor galleries of this cultural institution into an oasis of complex optical phenomena. Read the full review here.

Today, Chicago’s Volume Gallery launches Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: I DO, an exhibition devoted to the American multidisciplinary artist. Best known for her bold, 1960s wall-painted Supergraphics and widely recognized for her influence on the trajectory of graphic design, this is Solomon’s first solo show with the gallery. Now in her nineties, Solomon has begun focusing on paper, including drawing, collage, and publishing artist books. I DO comprises eighty-five 8.5 x 11 works on paper crafted with Solomon’s quintessential use of wordplay and graphic invention, exploring letter forms, language, feminism, interpersonal relationships, and autobiography. Until April 22

Artist Tanya Aguiñiga grew up in the United States/Mexico borderland. She was born in San Diego and lived with her family in Tijuana. Every day, Aguiñiga crossed the border to attend a public school in San Diego. Aguiñiga’s home life and her family shaped her understanding of craft and design. The handmade objects in her home were sturdy and practical, but also colorful and decorative. Even more, they carried intergenerational wisdom. “The objects our ancestors made still have lessons within them,” the artist observed in a 2022 interview. Read the full article here.

A home isn’t just bricks and mortar—it’s a place where relationships are built and broken, where life enters and where it leaves, and where love is fostered, whatever that might look like. Leading designer Kelly Wearstler makes it her business to know this, creating spaces that absorb, reflect and celebrate the lives of their inhabitants. No two Wearstler projects read the same. “I don’t really like doing something twice,” she states. Channelling clients’ desires through her sophisticated lens, Wearstler is committed to the art of listening. Take her redesign of a classic 1960s California bungalow in Brentwood—the owners were expecting a baby during the renovation, so moving in meant starting their new life as a family. In Wearstler’s sympathetic style, the four-bed, six-bath house seems to breathe this feeling of new life throughout its 929 square metres‑everything from the earthy colour scheme to the use of soft, textured fabric feels like an expression of hope and of the freshest, most cushy kind of love. The more formal living room is decorated with bespoke furnishings and highlights from the couple’s expansive art collection. Many objects, like a sculptural saffron-toned console by Ross Hansen—noted by Wearstler as one of her favourite pieces in the home—straddle art and design. Read the full article here.

FOG Design+Art, San Francisco’s annual international art and design fair, never fails to exhaust me. It’s in the way you might become exhausted after a huge, delicious meal—at once satiated and somehow still hungry for more. Your stomach can’t be as big as your eyes when there is this much to look at. Presented in the 50,000-square-foot Festival Pavilion at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, the ninth edition of FOG hosts over 45 exhibitors from as close as down the block to as far as Milan, and offers a snapshot of the global state of the arts, confirming the Bay Area as a major force within it. At Volume Gallery’s booth from Chicago, weight meets lightness in Ross Hansen’s chandeliers and sconces, formed from hemp fabric cast in resin and suspended with lengths of chain. Read the full article here.