Artists & Designers

Eero Aarnio is one of the architects and designers responsible for firmly establishing Finland in the international design market of the 1960s. He was educated at the Taideteollisuuskeskuskoulu (School of Industrial Design) in Helsinki from 1954 to 1957.

Italian architect and designer Michele de Lucchi was born in Ferrara, Italy in 1951. After graduating from the University of Florence with a degree in architecture in 1975, he moved to Milan where he encountered the influential Memphis group led by Ettore Sottsass. He designed for Studio Alchimia, and in the 1980s, for Memphis and was largely responsible for its incorporation of geometric motifs on plastic laminates.

Born February 11, 1961 in Bryan, Texas, Russell Buchanan attended Texas A&M University earning a Bachelor of Environmental Design degree in 1983. He promptly began an architectural internship at Harwood K. Smith & Partners and then attended the Architectural Association in London from 1985 to 1986 in the History and Theory Programme. While in London, he began designing furniture.

American architect and designer Richard Meier is internationally renowned for his geometric architectural designs, including the Barcelona Museum of Contempoary Art, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome. Meier holds a B.A. in Architecture from Cornell University (1957) and briefly worked for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and Marcel Breuer before starting his own practice in 1963.

Known for combining grand forms with reductive geometric shapes, Milan-based architect Aldo Rossi had offices in New York City, the Hague, and Tokyo, and directed a small staff in designing and constructing more than 100 buildings around the world.

Co-founder of the Dallas School of Creative Arts in 1933 and one of the founders of the Craft Guild of Dallas in 1948, Velma Dozier was dedicated in her pursuit of complicated metal techniques and their incorporation into unique and well-made metalwork and jewelry. Born in 1901 in Elm Mott, Texas, a small town north of Waco, Velma moved to Dallas with her family in 1919.

George Nelson, one of the leading industrial designers of the twentieth century, was particularly known for his interest in novel structural solutions to furniture design, reflective of his study of architecture and interest in European modernism.

Ettore Sottsass was an Italian architect and designer, born in Austria in 1917 but raised in Milan, Italy, where his father was an architect. He graduated from the Politechnico di Torino in 1939 with a degree in architecture and then served in the Italian military in WWII, with a significant amount of time spent in a concentration camp in Yugoslavia.

Ceramicist Elsa Rady was born in New York City to a family of artists. Her mother Lily Mehlman Rady had been a Martha Graham dancer, and her father, Simon Rady, was a record company executive and producer. From 1962 to 1966 she studied ceramics at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (now the California Institute of the Arts) with renowned ceramic artists Ralph Bacerra and Otto and Vivika Heino.