Looking Back at NYCxDesign’s Edgier Installations and Exhibitions

Metropolis highlights eight young practitioners who kept this year’s design week fresh and alive with experimental works.

NYCxDesign 2019 Edgier Installations Exhibitions
A chair designed by Malcolm Majer Courtesy the designer

Beyond its larger, more commercially-oriented exhibitors, NYCxDesign also draws legions of young designers in search of inspiration and opportunities to share their ideas. The design week’s more experimental moments typically play out at smaller fairs and exhibitions, such as the Next Level showcase, which wrapped its second edition, and The Homosexual Objét at Brooklyn design gallery-cum-shop Fredericks and Mae. Though the designers highlighted in this article hail from diverse locales, certain themes—such as material indulgence, a self-conscious cheekiness, and a yen for both the sculptural and the functional—weave together the disparate practices. But rather than try to cohere the works along tenuous categories, perhaps it’s best to see them for what they are: evidence that contemporary design’s triumphs, reimaginings, and everyday constraints are borne by its younger practitioners.

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