Atlanta-based furniture maker and craft researcher Robell Awake works out of a modest, ten-foot shed that he built in his backyard during the pandemic. Long interested in chairmaking, he quit his salaried job in construction shortly before the birth of his first child when he knew he wouldn’t be offered paternity leave. His bold, expressive ladderback chairs are imbued with craft knowledge gleaned from years as a maker, but they are also imprinted with his experiences as a father, a person of the Black diaspora, and a writer (he recently published a well-received book on the history of Black craftspeople in the United States). Read the interview here.

In 2010, Jonathan Olivares wrote one of the first articles published on Jonathan Muecke, attempting to demystify the hard-to-classify objects Muecke designed as a student at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. To open the piece, Olivares described what he imagined to be the only similarity between a laundry hamper and Lake Michigan: they both embody the principle of containment. Muecke’s objects, Olivares wrote, invoke similarly large-scale concepts, describing them as “stripped of special-case functionality and references, and express only larger phenomena such as absorption, containment, conversion, filtration, and gravity.” Read the full article here.