Welcome to The Buzz, our monthly roundup of design world news and inspiration for Design Miami’s discerning community of creatives and collectors. Enjoy!

Design Miami/ Basel opens next week!

We’re just one week away from the 17th edition of Design Miami/ Basel! This year’s fair has been designed as a celebration of the galleries that have established—and continue to shape—the market for collectible design as we know it today. The show will feature world-class historic and contemporary design pieces from over 25 esteemed exhibitors from around the globe, and introduce a selection of outstanding new gallery partners too. We can’t wait to see you there! The fair is open June 13-18; tickets available here.

Glitz and Glamour: 200 Years of Lobmeyr

To mark the 200th anniversary of Vienna-based glass manufacturer Lobmeyr, the MAK Museum presents Glitz and Glamour, an exhibition spotlighting exceptional works produced by the esteemed company over the past two centuries. Known for its cooperations with renowned designers throughout the years—including the likes of design legends Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos, as well as contemporary standouts such as Max Lamb, Martino Gamper, and Stefan Sagmeister, among others—Lobmeyr has consistently reinterpreted glass in a way that is always in keeping with the times. The show is co-curated by the MAK’s Rainald Franz and guest curator Alice Stori Liechtenstein. June 7-September 24

London Design Biennale

Now showing: The 2023 edition of the London Design Biennale takes on the theme ‘The Global Game: Remapping Collaborations,” showcasing work by over 40 international exhibitors that aim to demonstrate design’s role in improving our world.  This year’s event welcomes Dutch national museum Nieuwe Instituut as its artistic director, led by General Director (and former Design Miami Curatorial Director!) Aric Chen. Presenters offer up perspectives and solutions for issues facing humanity today, ranging from the urban environment to environmental sustainability to humanitarian responses to conflict. Through June 25th at Somerset House

“This year's theme is about testing the potential of international collaboration. We all know that global challenges require global cooperation, but that's an increasingly tall order at a time of rising nationalism, hardening borders, and growing geopolitical instability. Design is collaborative by nature, and with the biennale being a site of international representation—with its national and other pavilions—we want to create an alternative geopolitical landscape driven not by competition and conflict, but cooperation instead. And so we've asked the pavilions to not just think about collaboration, but to actually collaborate with each other (with the help of a web-based game)—to do instead of simply ponder and reflect, and show us how design transcends borders, because it has to.” —Aric Chen, curator

Konstantin Grcic: Transformers

In Paris, Galerie kreo presents German designer Konstantin Grcic’s latest solo show, Transformers. Diverting a precision measuring device used in the automotive and aeronautical industries—an aluminum extrusion, perforated with a double row of holes on each side—Grcic embraces the possibilities of modular systems, creating a collection of nine pieces (including lights, tables, and consoles) that point to both the history of modular production and the as-yet unknown future of making. The resulting works feel both future-facing and familiar. As art critic Ingrid Luquet-Gad observes: “The structures, adorned with chains and hooks, capture a range of connotations: they are simultaneously reminiscent of medieval candlesticks and cybernetic spaceships.”  Until August 26

Dee Clements: The Future has an Ancient Heart

Dee Clements’ first solo show at Miami’s Nina Johnson gallery features new, large-scale woven baskets and sculptural works that reflect the Chicago-based artist’s decades-long fascination with craft and ethnography. The result of years of research into paleolithic weaving traditions, Clements’ work examines the societal roles to which women have been relegated, recontextualizing and honoring crafts that have historically been deemed “women’s work.”

As Clements explains: “Craft reveals rich connections between people, materials, objects and culture…I use basketry to combine all the elements of my 25-year practice; painting, sculpture, ceramics, furniture making and weaving to create three-dimensional forms that reference female bodies and experiences.” On view through July 29

“This new body of work explores craft through lenses of feminism, ethnography and patriarchy, emphasizing the unseen labor of women. I am beyond thrilled to be showing it with Nina Johnson, who I admire and respect as a woman, gallerist, collector, and mentor." —Dee Clements, designer

Fractured at Mindy Solomon

Also in Miami, Mindy Solomon’s upcoming Fractured exhibition spotlights a trio of artists working primarily in clay: Francie Bishop Good, Andrew Casto, and David Hicks. Each artist pushes the boundaries of contemporary ceramics and abstract expressionism through surface and form, and the resulting, striking objects explore the roots of personal identity and artistic language, the stress relieving benefits of making, objects as talismans, and art as an antidote to challenges of our day. June 10- July 29

“We live in a fractured world. I’ve always seen it as my role as an artist to attempt to make wholeness.”—artist Anish Kapoor

Design in Metamorphosis: Audrey Large and Théophile Blandet

This month, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève opens Design in Metamorphosis, an exhibition showcasing work by Audrey Large and Théophile Blandet, two innovative designers operating at the cutting-edge of design who are known for embracing new processes and technologies. As curators Barbara Brondi and Marco Rainò, tell us:: “Large and Blandet interpret the zeitgeist through an expressive canon that speaks of alteration, mutation, and change. [The show] reveals a sequence of ‘chrysalis’ of rare originality and symbolic power, displayed as fragments of a new, visionary creative culture. The curatorial work we have developed for this event…intends to signal a specific moment of next-generation experimental and contemporary design, open to exploring the opposing polarities of real and virtual, tangible and intangible, unique and reproducible in ways–theoretical and practical–that are spontaneously different from those of the recent past.” June 23-August 13

Two Can’t-Miss Shows at Carpenters Workshop Gallery

This month, Carpenters Workshop Gallery kicks off two exciting shows in its LA and Paris outposts. In LA, the group show CHAOS, curated by Alexander May of SIZED Studio, highlights contrasting textures and forms, and features works by 20+ historic and contemporary artists, including Gio Ponti, Wendell Castle, Ron Arad, Wonmin Park, Sterling Ruby, Jerome Byron, Thomas Housegeo, and Suda Kokuta. Meanwhile, in Paris, Dutch designer Frederik Molenschot opens Atlas 2000, his first solo show at the gallery, featuring new work that embodies his unique fusion of past and present, combining noble materials and elegant forms with cutting-edge technology and contemporary cultural references. Chaos is on view June 23 - September 9. Atlas 2000 is open now and runs through September 2.

Joana Schneider: If you know who she is, it’s time for Botox

In Amsterdam, Rademakers Gallery’s latest show—If you know who she is, it’s time for Botox—is a critical examination of beauty ideals featuring new work by Joana Schneider. The exhibition welcomes audiences into a life-size, heart-shaped dollhouse that depicts the artificial, plastic life of the highly popular children’s doll Polly Pocket, which first came on the market in 1989.  The uncanny installation includes boldly colored, handmade clothes and accessories composed of discarded ropes and leftover yarns. In referencing this pop culture symbol of her own generation—a generation that today finds the latest trends about lip fillers and Botox via daily Instagram videos—Schneider asks: How does the content we surround ourselves with, and in particular toys, influence how we perceive ourselves? And how do we define beauty today? ’Til July 22

Protist: Jack Craig at Volume Gallery

Chicago’s Volume Gallery presents Protist, its first solo exhibition with Detroit-based designer Jack Craig. Known for intriguing works that respond to our contemporary manufactured landscape, Craig—a former electrical engineer—creates new processes to alter familiar materials in ways that spark renewed appreciation for them. Protist, Craig’s latest body of work, is a furniture collection composed of melted carpet remnants, marked by vivid, colorful surfaces, in dappled and glistening blues, pinks, and greens. The collection is named after a category of single-celled organisms that are neither animal, plant, nor fungus.  June 23-August 12

Ebony G. Patterson Digs in at the New York Botanical Garden

Finally, Jamaican-born Ebony G. Patterson recently debuted a site-specific exhibition at New York Botanical Garden, entitled …things come to thrive…in the shedding…in the molting….— The project features a series of multimedia, sculptural and horticultural interventions in the 250-acre National Historic Landmark garden. As the first artist ever to embed within the institution for an immersive residency, Patterson worked directly with NYBG’s gardens and collections to create a body of work that reflects on the allure of the beautiful while also highlighting what lies beneath the surface. The show explores human’s fractured relationship with nature, the tensions that exist within the natural world, and how they reflect societal entanglements of race, gender, and colonialism. Through September 17