Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place surveys the last 10 years of Burks’s global workshop-based practice, alongside a new commission of speculative works exploring ideas concerning domesticity in the wake of global crises.
Through photo essays, essays, and conversations, the book contextualizes objects in a concurrent exhibition of the same name, on view through March 5 at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, and their underpinnings in Italian Radical Design and the New Bauhaus while charting a future for design that is more collaborative and community-driven. Beyond a portfolio of work, the book presents critical perspectives from contributors such as fellow practitioner Patricia Urquiola, design historian Glenn Adamson, and curators Beatrice Galilee, Monica Obniski, and Michelle Joan Wilkinson, as well as the late cultural critic bell hooks, whose voices ground Burks’s industrial design practice within larger conversations about race, craft, and society.
Developed in collaboration with Chicago-based graphic designers Normal Studio, this is a design book for reading!
The book centers the industrial design and craft collaborations within Burks’s workshop-based design practice and offers an opportunity to reflect on the potential of design at a time when racial, social, and environmental justice remain in jeopardy. Topics explored include an overview of the designer’s practice—from the foundational architecture culture of Chicago (Burks’s birthplace) to his latest speculative project—the workshop-based collaborative ethos of his studio, Stephen Burks Man Made, and the politics of design. There is also a conversation between bell hooks and Burks, in which hooks brings her critical eye to design as it relates to the broader field of African American cultural production.