Neri Oxman is simultaneously a hardcore ecologist, evocative futurist, meticulous artist, and abstract scientist. The 43-year-old Israeli-American designer, architect, inventor, and MIT Media Lab professor embodies the same dualities that her work hinges upon. Oxman’s multifarious projects transcend the digital age; Oxman’s multifarious projects transcend the digital age; instead, she’s pioneering the “Biological Age” through “material ecology,” which fuses biology and technology, nature and culture, and the grown and made. Among her works are energy-generating photosynthetic wearables, a geometric dome spun by a robotic arm and completed by a swarm of silkworms, and sinewy masks modeled, in part, after the wearer’s own anatomical and physiological makeup—projects as functional and ideologically ambitious as they are beautiful.
Outstanding in their aesthetic rigor, Oxman’s brainchildren have caught the attention of leading museums, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. This fall, she will receive SFMOMA's 2019 Contemporary Vision Award, and her next exhibition, “Material Ecology” at MoMA (on view from Feb. 22 to May 25, 2020), organized by Paola Antonelli and Anna Burckhardt, will present eight works from throughout her 20-year career—most notably an updated version of “Totems,” an array of vehicles for synthetically engineered melanin that debuted earlier this year in the Antonelli-curated “Broken Nature” exhibition at the Triennale in Milan.
Having pursued architecture after dropping out of medical school, Oxman went on to study at the Architectural Association in London and, later, at MIT, where after earning a Ph.D. she stayed on to become a professor and now leads the pathbreaking Mediated Matter group. On this episode of Time Sensitive, Oxman and Spencer Bailey delve into motherhood, “fossils of the future,” robotic queen bees, death masks, and more.
Edwina von Gal on Gardening as an Antidote
Hiroshi Sugimoto on Photography as a Form of Timekeeping
Ramdane Touhami on Why He Will Never Slow Down
Viet Thanh Nguyen on the Need to Recognize Coexisting Truths
Thaddeus Mosley on Making Art to Be Appreciated for Centuries
Adam Pendleton on His Ongoing Exploration of “Black Dada”
Paul Smith on Imbuing Clothing With Joy and Humor
Lucy Sante on on Transitioning Into Herself at Long Last
Ilse Crawford on Creating Lasting, “Living” Spaces
Massimo Bottura on Ethics, Aesthetics, and Slow Food
Helen Molesworth on Museums as Machines for Slowness
Annabelle Selldorf on Architecture as Portraiture
Walter Hood on Connecting People and Place Through Landscape Architecture
Min Jin Lee on the Healing Power of Fiction
Mira Nakashima on Keeping Her Father’s Woodworking Legacy Alive
Ian Schrager on Consistently Capturing the Zeitgeist
Sanford Biggers on Patching Together the Past, Present, and Future Through Art
Edmund de Waal on Pottery, Poetry, and the Act of Letting Go
Trent Davis Bailey on Finding Family and Community Through Photography
Robert Wilson on the Wonder to Be Found in Time, Space, and Light
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