Archive for the ‘products’Category

BRIDGET PARRIS: Dresses up your table

Bridget.001

Bridget Parris holding one of her whimsical paintings.

Imagine sitting at your best friends dinner table more befitting of what you would expect from the  late Fashion Designer Alexander McQueen. The guest in a wildly festival partying mood and laid out before you is an outrageously hyperstylized table that’s arrangement is whimsical and subliminal flowing with oversized candle holders, odd shaped water goblets, and unusual textured linens. These same forces are what drives Bridget Parris imagination to create beautiful and outlandish tabletop and textile designs.

Bridget Parris has parlayed a fine arts degree in painting into an award-winning career in tabletop and textile design. As if that’s not enough, Parris has broaden her repertoire with another degree in fashion design at Parsons the New School of Design in Manhattan. Parris spends much of her artistic energy merging home décor with fashion, seeking out the best of each medium to implore in her work.

Bridget Parris’s studio located in loft-like building in the trendy Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The space is small, but welcoming bright white walls are graced with a series of colorful paintings depicting lively whimsical figures catch and delight the eyes. These paintings represent her love of everything French.

Strong themes weave through Parris’ paintings and home creations; blend, interlock, curl, and stretch your imagination. Her designs are cross sampling of painting and product design; add much needed color to drab place settings or dresses-up austere living rooms.

Bridget Parris was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Today, her beloved former city is considered one of the hottest design places in the country touting company’s like Kohl’s, four major design schools and a slew top design firms. Growing up, Bridget admits this was not the case. Creative problem solving in Parris’ blood; her father a German immigrant worked as a Research & Development Engineer for Johnson Controls producing heating and cooling systems, and holds six patents and. Software copyrights. Her mother a high school mathematics teacher steered her two children towards local cultural activities and to follow their bliss.

Parris says, she was drawn to art at an early age and later supported by her high school teacher. Enrolling in Southern Illinois University, urged by her father to study art education convinced she would always have a study job. Bored in her first year Parris switched to Fine Arts studying painting, graduated in 1991. Eager to learn new things and explore she earned a MFA in painting and drawing in 1994 from Louisiana State University. That same year with only a drawing and painting portfolio, she moved to New York City. But realized that was not enough took textile design classes at School of Visual Art built-up her portfolio and supplemented her income with a temping job in Macy’s hard good department. Read the rest of this entry →

16

08 2013

Social Media Is Changing the Way We Decorate

Lots of amazing presentations jumping off throughout  Social Media Week, however I started my Valentine day off with Digital Voyeurism panel held at the Hearst Magazines Urban Theater.  Much like the early onset of food bloggers revolutionized blogging—now design/lifestyle bloggers are making huge strides blogging about what’s chic and using social media— all has changed the way people decorate there spaces. Speaking on the what’s chic Bryan Batt,  Jeanine Hays, and Christiane Lemieux, each shared stories of about their blogs, shops and products. Now design bloggers are taking the lead with decorating magazines following suit and featuring eclectic colorful home decor photography from a more humanistic perspective rather then sterile sparse decor of the past.

Bryan Batt

Everyday Design by Maleneb

The debut article of my first By Design column featured in International Review of African American Art, Fall 2011 issue spotlights the fabulous Malene Barnett, carpeting and rug designer.

The Art of Everyday Use
MALENE BARNETT CLIENTS ARE FLOORED BY HER RUGS
Not all carpeting rolls off assembly lines in factories or is imported from exotic places in the Middle East, China or India. Hand-made floor coverings that rise to the level of art are created by Malene Barnett, principal and owner of Maleneb in Brooklyn. She has built a brand specializing in hand-woven carpeting and rugs of original design and high-quality fibers for commercial sites and homes.

At the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, Barnett initially majored in fashion illustration but  really longed to paint. Her decision to change majors was clinched when she happened to see a display of  projects by students in the textile surface design department.  As a textile design major, she was inspired by the early textile renderings of Lois Mailou Jones, a young, African American designer who went on to become a major 20th century American artist.

While taking a carpet design course, Barnett won first prize for a Stark Carpets-sponsored, carpet design competition, and committed to this specialized field in textile design.

Barnett graduated in 1996 and worked for a succession of companies, including Afritext where she modernized their line of African prints; and Nourison, an industry leader, developing products for major household brands.

After four years at Nourison, Barnett had an urge to explore the world. She quit her job and, carrying just a backpack with seven outfits, traveled to India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore and Hong Kong.  Each environment piqued her curiosity about the indigenous spiritual symbols, patterns and architecture of the cultures that she visited. She sketched this iconography in a small sketchbook as ideas for new designs.

Back in the States, Barnett worked freelanced for her previous employer, Nourison, designing handmade accent rugs and carpeting for some well-established consumer brands such as Bed, Bath and Beyond, Nicole Miller, Liz Claiborne and Macy’s. With her guidance, Nourison profits grew from $1 million to $15 million. Then Barnett was offered an opportunity to start a carpeting line with JLA Homes, a home furnisings company; once again profits increased.

When the economy started to tank in 2008, Barnett decided to launch Maleneb.  “Why would you even think of starting up a studio in such a dismal economy?” I wondered. “The timing was right,” she replied.  In leaving Nourison, she again was following a calling. She defines herself as a visual artist, with a propensity for hand drawing and painting, who loves to design carpeting and rugs. And besides, she explained, “most of my previous projects offered little exploration of my own ethnic sensibility.”

The luxurious residential rugs and carpeting in the Maleneb collection are hand woven designs based on the icons, patterns and colors that Barnett observed during her travels and as she continues to look to  artifacts from various ethnic cultures and the natural environment for inspiration, her work is informed by food rituals, ancient architectural structures, traditional garments, unusual  textile patterns and paintings are a part of the mix.

The collection consists of three distinctive themes: Signature reflects the diversity of everyday life, for example, the Mehndi-inspired rugs of rich burgundy and red wool yarn with linear designs based on a palm decorated with henna tattooing for a wedding. Classical— traditional motifs and icons such as the Adinkra writing system of Ghana. And texture which explores the multiplicity of organic forms in nature. In order to achieve the characteristics of flowing water, mountainous landscapes and tree trunk textures for the Texture theme, Barnett mastered a distinctive technique of creating varying pile heights.

As a member of the Good Weave organization working to end child labor in South Asia, all Maleneb pieces carry the “Good Weave” brand to distinguish them from those made under exploitative circumstances.

Besides designing the collection, Barnett gets numerous requests for commissioned projects. For example, Ken Staves, an architect based in Calgary, Canada, called to request rugs for his new home, based on photography he had shot of magnificent, New York City architectural skylines.  From this imagery, Barnett crafted a series of tapestries that now hang on the walls in Staves’ home. The Carl Ross Design Croup hired Barnett to create special rug tapestries for the lobby walls of the Hyatt Vacation Club Hacienda del Mar in Mexico. Her design for this commission was inspired by the 15th century rock art of the Taino Indians of Mexico.

A spunky seven-year-old girl passion for drawing and painting has become one of the top designers of carpeting and rugs in New York City.

Limited Edition Tap Tap rug, abstract angular colorful shapes, with varying piles based on the colorful, hand-painted local tap tap buses in Haiti, this rug design was featured in the Global African Project exhibition catalog, 2010.

For more information on Maleneb click: maleneb.com 

 

 

OpenInvo Wants YOUR Ideas

Fellow SVA Alumni Emily Lutzker has launched OPENINVO an innovative  online community for businesses that bridges people from the arts and creative fields with corporations.


If you have a brilliant idea for a new product or service, then join as an Idea Provider. We then present your ideas to corporations looking to innovate. The system protects your intellectual property along the way and we make it our job to get you the best compensation for your ideas. OpenInvo is an R&D resource for open innovation where individuals submit ideas for new products and services and companies gain access to those ideas for innovative new solutions

For more information link to: OpenInvo: unexpected innovation. unexpected opportunity. openinvo.com

 

 

15

04 2011

Masterful Chef Ferran Adriá Flips the Switch and Caters to a Mass Market

Ferran Adriá gastronimic bubbles has burst,  and El Bulli his world class restaurant is turning into a research foundation that will reach out to the masses via daily internet postings. Stay tune for more fab food creations from the world’s number 1 chef.

excerpt from Guaradian

The world’s greatest chef has had enough. “I don’t care now whether I have three stars, or however many. Or whether I am No 1 or No 28,” explains Ferran Adrià, the former plate-washer who has revolutionised high cuisine over the past 20 years.

“You can’t stay at number one forever. Imagine if Barcelona won the Champions League for 15 seasons,” he adds. “The system couldn’t handle it.”

Adrià’s words may sound world-weary, but in fact they are the opposite. Having reached the top, and stayed there for so long, he is closing his world-famous El Bulli restaurant and turning its location, in a charming Mediterranean cove, into a research foundation that will reach out to the masses by publishing daily on the internet. For more read the Guardian

 

 

01

04 2011

What’s FOODAM

FOODAM is a meeting point between the world of Art, Food and Design.
It lives in the whole city who becomes a place of exploration, exposure and debate on the future and innovation of food, its imaginary and its apparatus.

Send us your idea about the future of food. It could be a product or a prototype, a book or a infographic, a website or a process, a taste or a scenario, a restaurant or a recipie. Food talks about our life. Its future will change our world.

GLIDE10: Fabiola Berdiel + Cynthia Lawson Development through Empowerment, Entrepreneurship, and Design.

GLIDE10: Fabiola Berdiel + Cynthia Lawson Development through Empowerment, Entrepreneurship, and Design presenters brings us up-to-date on Parsons School of Design ongoing mission of incorporating social responsibility in to learning processes as applied to several design disciplines such as product, architecture and more.

One great aspect of Parsons School of Design  program is there hybridity of bringing students together from various disciplines to share information to build stronger coherent knowledge bases. The challenge is instructors function as facilitators, this mode of teaching forces the students to take a more interactive role to immerse themselves fully in there projects, and learn new platforms of studying beyond formal and informal methods of learning.  Students also have the opportunity to acquire primary research through traveling to developing/emerging  countries and explore various modes of practices while interacting with local people,  investigating new materials and methods to enhance new ways of design thinking. This provides the student with practical and hands-on experiences to build a diverse dialog rooted  in social and cultural constructs not available by just sitting in a classroom or surfing the internet.

 

Questions:
I’m curious how the outcomes are measured by the students each semester? When the students interact with other cultures through travels, how does this figure into the collaborative process? How do these other ethnic cultures respond to the presences of your students?

I love the concept of students taking on the role of facilitators as a shared experience with this projects. How does this method evolve from semester to semester? Do the students view themselves as real agents of change? If so what are some of the outcomes?

What are the draws backs of the participatory process in this model of learning?

For more information click on: deed.parsons.edu

On Point: Beijing’s Ongoing Pollution Problems!

One major problem that continuously plagues Beijing is the battle to clean up the city’s pollution. There rating is worst than Los Angeles. Despite our spending only three days in Beijing we couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by the densely polluted air. I felt like, I could literally reach out and grab puffs pollution in my hands. Don’t be surprised to see people walking or riding bikes with designer style surgical mask. It’s not to protect people against “SARS,” but to help them breathe. In order to ebb the tide of pollution, Beijing has launched a program to bring back bike riding to curtail car traffic.

31

01 2010