Furniture As Art with BADG & Kravet
Celebrating 30 Years of Kravet Furniture with BADG
Where does inspiration come from? For our anniversary, we are exploring how our art – in this case, the iconic Georgetown Chair – inspires other artists.
We collaborated with four makers from the Black Artists + Designers Guild to transform this classic chair into their own innovative vision. Own a piece of this inspiration by bidding at the Black Joy Auction 10/26.
Johanna Howard
Textile & Product Designer
Founder of Johanna Howard Home
Johanna Howard brings her background in eveningwear design to the Georgetown Chair with her artistic application of handmade fabric flowers. Her process always starts with the textile – this design was inspired by her signature ombré alpaca throw. Ombré is a powerful motif, as it allows the observer to feel motion through vision alone. Using the original Kravet upholstery fabric, she cut and dyed individual strips to create flowers for a sense of vibrancy and joy.
Lana Abraham-Murawski
Visual Artist
Lana Abraham-Murawski used fabric markers, beading and buttons on the Georgetown chair to create The Treebird Throne, featuring a black being with wings and limbs that reach back to braided hair. Its body stands on glorious riches represented by the gold and black beads. The water towers are a symbol of life contained by man. The bird, ready to take flight, looking to the horizon with unlimited possibilities, transforms into a tree, grounded, growing and connected. The horizon on the front creates a silhouette of a person, with a “peek-a-boo” from the back to connect the vision.
Tiffanni Reidy
Designer & Founder of Reidy Creative
Tiffanni Reidy is a multi-hyphenate creative whose work ranges in and between interior architecture, creative direction, graphic design, photography, and publication design. She designed her chair as a modern take on hand-dyed mudcloth (Bogolan) with patterns that represent luxury (X), community and family (circle dot), seduction and fertility (belt of dots). The fabric was dyed in layers over several days using sponges and brushes, then decorated using paint makers.
Holly McWhorter
Painter & Graphic Designer
Holly McWhorter is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and designer based in Brooklyn, New York. The concept for Holly’s Georgetown chair is grounded in a series of infographics created by Black sociologist W.E.B. DuBois for the 1900 Paris Exhibition. He created an exhibition of portraits, charts, and graphs that upended the racist caricatures that sought to diminish African American social and economic success. This chair is a tribute not only to DuBois, but a nod to the resilience, strength, and incredible professional, economic, and cultural achievements of Black Americans during the Reconstruction period and since.
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