Art
Ettore Sottsass's Candy-Colored Utopian Design
The Met Breuer's exhibition makes the case that it wasn’t just an aesthetic Sottsass unleashed on the world, but a particular way of interpreting the past and imagining the future.
Sarah Archer
Sarah Archer is a writer, curator, and all-purpose decorative arts nerd based in Philadelphia.
Art
The Worst McMansion Sins, From Useless Pilasters to Hellish Transom Windows
Kate Wagner's blog McMansion Hell is like a snarky DSM-IV for all that ails contemporary over-building in suburban developments.
Art
How the 1960s and ’70s Counterculture Queered Fashion
Counter-Couture at the Museum of Arts and Design offers a new way to think about the legacy of the counterculture movement.
Art
A Western Cultural History of Pink, from Madame de Pompadour to Pussy Hats
It goes without saying that pink is unserious. But why?
Opinion
"Hands to Work, Hearts to God": A Post-Election Craft Manifesto
In the wisdom of a small, furniture-obsessed religious sect founded in the 18th century, we may find a way to start moving forward.
Art
How Dutch Wax Fabrics Became a Mainstay of African Fashion
The Philadelphia Museum of Art examines the past and present of Vlisco fabrics, a symbol of our hyperconnected, postcolonial material world.
Art
Ceramic Vases that Contain All the Beauty and Ugliness of US History
PHILADELPHIA — Of all the astonishing things Roberto Lugo has done in his career — from creating a DIY potter’s wheel and mixing his own clay from dirt in an urban scrapyard, to creating a new genre of hip-hop-inflected political porcelain — the most radical might be that he is head over heels in lo
News
Why the Closing of the Museum of Contemporary Craft Is a Major Loss
The next time you find yourself hate-reading a fawning profile of a photogenic young Brooklyn potter whose hot-pink-rimmed wares are transforming the “stuffy world of ceramics into a cool new craft” (or something to that effect), navigate yourself away from there, and instead visit the website of th
Art
The Genre That Wasn’t There: A Wide-Ranging Examination of Postwar Ceramics
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Leave it to a former professional studio potter to organize a wide-ranging exhibition of postwar ceramics that’s relatively free of hangups about form and function.
Opinion
The Bauhaus Connection in Google’s New Logo
When the news broke yesterday that Google had a brand new logo — the biggest change to its visual identity since its inception in 1998 — the design twitterverse exploded with commentary about the thickness of the new letterforms and their conspicuous lack of serifs.
Art
Contemporary Artists Create a New Kind of Order at the Barnes Foundation
PHILADELPHIA — It’s an illuminating mental exercise to ponder: what if Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the pharmaceutical tycoon and physician who assembled an unmatched collection of Post-Impressionist and early Modern paintings in Philadelphia, was actually an installation artist before his time?
Art
'Back to the Future' 30 Years Later, or Riding in Cars with Millennials
One of the greatest pleasures of teaching design history to college students is time travel.