PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Philadelphia Museum of Art announced that Stephen Burks, an internationally renowned industrial designer, has been honored with Collab’s 2023 Design Excellence Award during a celebration at the museum. Collab, the PMA’s affiliate group for modern and contemporary design, presents this annual award, now in its 37th year, to design icons in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the field of design. In conjunction with the award, the PMA showcases Burks’s work in the new exhibition, Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place, which surveys the past ten years of his craft-centered, workshop-based design practice and features a specially commissioned speculative project. The exhibition will be on display at the PMA in the Collab Gallery through April 14, 2024.
For nearly twenty years, Stephen Burks has forged a unique path by finding opportunities for innovation in the space between handcraft and industry, which has become a hallmark of his practice. Burks and his studio Stephen Burks Man Made have been commissioned by many of the world’s leading design-driven brands, including Cappellini, DEDON, Missoni, and Roche Bobois, among others, to develop collections that creatively synthesize handcraft traditions with industrial production. Burks has stated, “Hands have power... Even today, the hand is capable of doing things that machines cannot.” His collaborations with artisans and craftspeople all over the globe, from Senegal and South Africa to Peru and the Philippines, demonstrate the creative impact that the hand can have on industrial products. Guiding Burks’s approach is his underlying belief that design should be inclusive of all cultural perspectives and backgrounds.
The exhibition, Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place, explores new ideas concerning domesticity—namely asking how we can design our interiors to enable joyful living while empowering our creativity. It features nearly 45 key objects from the last ten years of Burks’s practice, as a type of mid-career survey, that exemplifies his aim of “returning the hand to industry.” The furniture, lighting, textiles, and craft-related experiments on view highlight his innovative craft collaborations and demonstrate his holistic approach across the disciplines of art, architecture, and design that underscores principles of synthesizing craft, community, and industry. A highlight is Burks’s Traveler Armchair with Hood (Designed 2014), which was manufactured by Paris-based firm Roche Bobois, with whom Burks is a frequent collaborator. The Traveler, which was inspired by the dense forests photographed by Thomas Struth in his Paradise series from the late 1990s, was the first work by Roche Bobois to enter a museum collection when the PMA acquired it in 2016.
The works from Burks’s professional practice are presented in the gallery alongside five prototypes from his new speculative project—Shelter in Place—which explores radical new ideas regarding design's relationship to our spirituality, our homes, and our communities, post-pandemic. The Shelter in Place commission emerged from discussions between Burks and the High Museum of Art’s Curator of Decorative Arts and Design and exhibition organizer, Monica Obniski, that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project allowed Burks to imagine multiple radical concepts for the home, including Spirit House, which functions as a modern portable altar and reflects Burks’s ongoing interest in design’s ability to connect us to our need for spirituality and ritual.
Eileen Tognini, Collab Board Member, commented, “We are thrilled to celebrate Stephen as this year’s Design Excellence Award honoree. His ability to combine craft with industrial production, while embracing cultural diversity around the globe is truly special and deserves much praise. He continues to think holistically about design and recognizes the enormous power of design to improve our everyday lives and our society more broadly in this current post-pandemic moment.”
Sasha Suda, George D. Widener Director and CEO at the Philadelphia Museum of Art said, “The PMA is committed to championing a broader and inclusive curatorial direction, one that involves taking a more thoughtful approach to the collections in which we choose to invest and display. Stephen’s conviction that design is cultural production and that it has the opportunity to represent everyone’s approach to life is truly inspiring. The PMA is honored to host this important exhibition and we look forward to welcoming visitors to start their own conversations about their relationship with design and home.”
Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by the High Museum of Art and Yale University Press, featuring essays by High Museum of Art curator Monica Obniski, author and historian Glenn Adamson, curator and critic Beatrice Galilee, and an introduction by Spanish architect and designer Patricia Urquiola, who was honored with the Collab Design Excellence Award in 2017. Additional texts include an interview with Burks by Michelle Joan Wilkinson, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and a conversation between Burks and the late bell hooks.
