Collectible New York took over a former Upper East Side movie theatre, and the best of it shows why limited-edition design now sits at the serious end of the luxury market.
A cinema days away from becoming a gourmet grocery store has spent the week hosting lacquer screens, bark sconces and a room divider made from old phone cords. That is Collectible New York, which is on view in the former AMC Orpheum 7 on the Upper East Side through 8 November, just before the building turns into an outpost of the upscale food market Happier Grocery.
The fair is strictly about 21st-century collectible furnishings by independent talents. It began in Brussels in 2017 and arrived in New York in 2023, where it fills what its organisers see as a gap in the US for avant-garde, limited-edition work that is artistic and experimental by nature. “The enthusiasm of the community and audience here has affirmed our place in the city,” says co-founder Liv Vaisberg.
This year it moved to November, a placement that sets it against the blue-chip gallery fair Salon Art + Design and the hospitality showcase BDNY. The edition gathers 110 talents from 27 countries. Projection booths and screening rooms stand in for white-cube booths, and the raw, double-height volumes give the work room to breathe.
Materials with something to say
The strongest thread running through the building is experimentation with matter: clay, stone, wood and metal, shaped into sculptural pieces. New York practice Streicher Goods brought a new collection of glazed ceramics. Georgian practice Studio Gypsandconcrete, shown by upstate New York gallery Jamieri, introduced bent stainless-steel mirrors that make a clever game of the reflective surface itself.
Anjuli Bernstein shows pictorial woven works made from unexpected materials, and Boym Partners contributes sconces painted onto bark. Then there is Scentry, a project by Louis Filosa: lamps that hold perfumes meant to evoke different people. Ka’b Juun, billed as New York’s first permanent Mexican design gallery, is presenting new work built around materials native to Mexico.
What makes an heirloom?
The second theme is a question the fair asks quietly and repeatedly: what makes an object valuable enough to be handed down? Coryander Friend, founder of the Montana gallery Placed, argues that today’s collectible designers belong to a fourth industrial revolution, picking up skills on their own or through training. Her advice for sustaining a practice and keeping it authentic is that designers “should be going baroque in order to not go broke.”
Her gallery’s presentation, titled “A Future for History”, puts that into practice with Faye Hadfield’s toothy ceramics and a chainmail lampshade by Wretched Flowers.
Elsewhere, New York’s iitem studio shows a meticulously finished lacquer screen with jewel-like finials, a new piece with a deco flavour. Brooklyn studio Overt Cove turned upcycled phone cords into a room divider, presented by the Philadelphia cooperative gallery Dudd Haus. Bunce Studio’s precision-engineered tables, benches and shelves carry an industrial accent.
The office, reimagined
The most theatrical moment belongs to the Curated section. Alex Tieghi-Walker, founder of downtown gallery TIWA Select, staged it as a “corporate fantasy” called “Human Resources”: a run of office cells, uniform on purpose, interrupted by smaller objects from the likes of Tino Seubert and Adi Asia. “The installation is an invitation to designers to imagine a different kind of working environment,” Tieghi-Walker says. “One that makes room for personality, surprise and the unexpected, and where the objects around us might inspire us as much as they serve us.”
It is a neat summary of the whole fair, and of the pitch for the category. A ceramic with teeth, a mirror folded from steel or a lamp that smells like someone you know is priced and collected for its authorship, its scarcity and the craft behind it. Collectors can be confident they are buying the work of an individual hand, and the heirloom question gives that hand a long horizon.
Collectible has now planted itself between the established salon and the trade show, and the crowd that turned out suggests the slot suits it. Vaisberg’s reading is that the city has confirmed the fair’s place. After this edition, with a cinema full of makers who treat a chair, a screen or a sconce as a statement, that is hard to argue with.
Via Wallpaper*