Feminine Californian designers celebrated in new R & Firm exhibition

A brand new present at New York design gallery R & Firm (4 November 2022 – 27 January 2023) explores the work of a gaggle of ladies designers who’ve lived, labored, studied and taught in California, and who had been impressed by the state. 

The works of Evelyn Ackerman, Ray Eames, Claire Falkenstein, Arline Fisch, Trude Guermonprez, Greta Magnusson Grossman, Wendy Maruyama, Merry Renk, Cheryl Riley, June Schwarcz, Kay Sekimachi, Pamela Weir-Quiton, Jade Snow Wong, and Marguerite Wildenhain will kind the exhibition, all masters in objects making of all scales. 

‘Born Too Tall: California Girls Designers, Postwar to Postmodern’

The works on present vary vastly in breadth of use – from jewelry to furnishings and tapestries – and materiality, which incorporates ceramics, glass, wooden, textiles, and metals. However what these feminine designers have in widespread is a capability to infuse pragmatism with magnificence, to brighten not for beauty impact however reasonably to combine or elicit magnificence as an integral a part of the work.

Highlights embody jewelry by nonagenarian Arline Fisch, now Brooklyn-based, together with her ‘floating sq.’ 18ct gold brooch (1987), whereas equally valuable is Cheryl R Riley’s ‘Brush Strokes Cigarette Desk 1 (Gold)’ (2000) in wooden, gesso and paint. 

The expressive and characterful tapestries of Evelyn Ackerman, who has been making textile works for the reason that Fifties, and the hanging fibre works of Kay Sekimachi, present the breath of textile works alone – a fabric that has up to now been levied as a lesser ‘female’ artform. Pamela Weir-Quiton’s anthropomorphic chest of drawers and animal rockers are as joyful as they’re masterful, and showcase the abilities of her 60-year woodworking profession. 

Swedish designer and architect Greta Magnusson Grossman was one of many feminine anomalies to achieve worldwide recognition for her work within the post-war years. Grossman, who had established her personal studio in Stockholm within the Thirties, left for Los Angeles in the course of the Second World Warfare and arrange store together with her husband on Rodeo Drive. Her 1952 walnut and formica eating desk, which options within the exhibition, is indicative of her formal Scandinavian coaching, recalibrated via the lens of California’s cool, lengthy strains and informal restraint. 

The present goals to name consideration to the decades-long careers of those ladies artists who’ve usually gone under-represented within the historical past of design. The identify of the present is borrowed from Jade Snow Wong’s bestselling memoir, Fifth Chinese language Daughter, by which she resists an organized marriage, and in doing so challenges the preconceptions that society has laid out for her.