Jonathan Adler returns: The minimalist inside the maximalist

Design Better

Jonathan Adler returns to Design Better to discuss his journey from a teenage potter obsessed with clay to a celebrated designer whose work blends maximalism

Key takeaways

• Choosing commercial design over the traditional art gallery path provided more room for experimentation and growth.
• The art market can be creatively constraining by demanding consistent, identifiable styles.

Main topics

• Jonathan Adler's creative journey from potter to designer
• The tension between artistic authenticity and commercial success

Notable quotes

"The art market is constraining. If you are a successful artist, you end up having to really zero in on a style."

"I'm so glad I went commercial because had I decided to become an art potter, I think I would have been much more creatively constrained."

Conclusion

Jonathan Adler's story reveals how embracing commerce, personal history, and

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) I think the art market is constraining. I think that if you are a successful artist, you end up having to really zero in on a style. And your currency is dictated by how clear and identifiable your style is. So in a funny way, it's creatively constraining. Whereas a designer, the stakes are lower, but the ability to try and fail is much greater. Speaker 1 (0:29) Jonathan Adler was one of our favorite guests on the show, so we've been angling to get him back ever since. He started as a potter and now designs furnishings and interiors that are decadent, but layered with meaning and a great sense of humor. A lot has happened since we last spoke with him. He had a retrospective at the Museum of Arts and Design, which is the same institution who took a chance on him 32 years ago and sold his pottery. He's also launched a sprawling collaboration with Michaels, which he calls a temple of craft. We talk with Jonathan about what it felt like to stop making long enough to Speaker 3 (1:04) curate three decades of his own work, why he's grateful he chose commerce over the gallery world, and whether people really are trading doom scrolling for making things with their hands. Along the way, we talk about his father, the lawyer who painted, and why the maximalist you think you know insists he's a minimalist. Also, much like our last conversation with Jonathan, there are some instances of adult language and humor. So if you have kids around, it might be a good idea to throw on some headphones. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and Speaker 1 (1:37) technology. I'm Eli Woodring. And I'm Aaron Walter. At Design Better, our mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and learn from the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a paid subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe. You'll get access to our Slack community where there's amazing people helping one another, our library of eBooks, and every podcast and post that we publish. Visit designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe to learn more. We'll return to the conversation after Speaker 3 (2:22) this quick break. Speaker 1 (2:22) And now, back to the show. Speaker 1 (2:37) Jonathan Adler, welcome back to Design Better. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to see you guys again. This is the second time you've been on the show. We're fascinated by the work that you do, your creative process, your team, and I think ultimately creative lifestyle. Thinking about creativity not as just a thing you do, but it's a way of life. Some of the things that we want to talk about today. And you have a really interesting new partnership with Michaels that we want to get into. But first... You went to summer camp as a kid, and that's where kind of the creative spark lights up for you, where you get experience working with clay. Tell us that story and what happened. Speaker 2 (3:18) I went to summer camp, I guess, when I was 12 years old, and I was a normal kid-ish. And I took a pottery class, and I was just hooked. You know, it's many, many decades later. And it's strange to look back and remember this weird moment where my life sort of took a direction that I couldn't have predicted. And I was just obsessed. And I turned into an abnormal kid and just kind of came home and just wanted to make pots and begged my parents for a wheel and kiln. And they gave me one for my bar mitzvah. And when normal kids were... doing normal things, I was in the basement of the house making pots. Speaker 1 (4:06) What was it in that moment that hooked you? Was it that you found a talent that you were good at something? Or was it the mystery of what happens with clay and what you can make? Speaker 2 (4:18) Everybody Speaker 1 (4:19) loves clay. Speaker 2 (4:20) Everybody loves to make pottery. If you say you're a potter at a party or a dinner, you can expect to get... bored to death by everyone's pottery stories because there's something very primal or primordial about the connection to clay. It's just like mud. So, you know, perhaps it was that childlike obsession with playing in the mud. For me, I was able to like see the matrix. I would never purport to say that I'm brilliantly talented. It wasn't that I touched clay and suddenly a virtuoso. was revealed the more i got into the world of pottery and the more i sort of grew obsessed with the very arcane movement realized in retrospect now which is sort of the studio craft movement which is a longer conversation we can have i became sort of a complete and total fanboy of the studio potters and i would imitate different potter styles and i was really somehow able to understand what different potters were trying to say. And I'm happy to say that in my youth, when I was such an obsessive potter, I really engaged with studio craftsmen in a kind of uncritical way. I wasn't applying a sense of taste or style. I was more just like, oh, huh. This is what this guy's stuff is about. This is what that chick's stuff is about. And I wasn't really judging it. It was like a data input period. And again, it feels so strange because I'm very seasoned now, which is a word for very old. And different parts of your life, for me at least, they feel very disconnected from my current self. I mean, I suppose I contain multitudes, but, you know, it was like this sort of dreamy, hazy. Where I almost feel like I was a different person, but I'm so glad I was that person when I was that person because so much data and knowledge went into my little brainlet, was able to pass through my little paws. My adolescence was a dreamy period of becoming an obsessed Potter fanboy. And it's weird, but it happened. As Speaker 3 (6:36) a side note. you made far better use of your bar mitzvah gifts than I did. I think in our family, it was a tradition just to waste the money on something completely frivolous. Like I got a keyboard, like a Casio keyboard that ended up collecting dust. And my cousin got a remote airplane that he crashed, I think, on the first day. The Speaker 2 (6:52) bar mitzvah was a bittersweet memory because the summer after the bar mitzvah was just my mother hondling me to write the thank you notes that a 13-year-old boy dreaded writing. It was so awful. It was just hanging over my head for an entire summer. Thank you notes. So Speaker 3 (7:09) is it true that your dad was a lawyer, but also as a hobby, he practiced pottery? Well, Speaker 2 (7:14) my dad was a very interesting person, case study model to either emulate or rebel against. I grew up in a tiny farm town, as did my dad. And he was kind of an intellectual and went to the University of Chicago in this very... important and intellectually dynamic time, I guess, in the early 50s. It was like Mike Nichols and Susan Sontag were there. It was this period of intellectualism. And he went there young, so he was brilliant and was an incredibly talented artist. He used to do all the illustrations for the school paper and stuff. And he found himself at a crossroads early in life, which was he could either follow the footsteps of his dad, who was a lawyer and then a judge, or he could embark on life as an artiste. And he met and married my mom, who was kind of an intellectual in her own right, I suppose, and decided to kind of have both a bourgeois and a bohemian life. But he decided he was going to work as a lawyer and provide a nice bourgeois life for his family and then spend... all of his spare time making art. In some ways, he was a model and an inspiration for me because his artistic journey, if you'll pardon Oprah talk, was really about endless experimentation. And I think by choosing to make art a hobby rather than a career, I actually think he ultimately had a more authentically creative life because he was... unencumbered by the constraints of the art market. And I think the art market is constraining. I think that if you are a successful artist, you end up having to really zero in on a style. And your currency is dictated by how clear and identifiable your style is. So in a funny way, it's creatively constraining, whereas he would paint and sculpt and... be interested in new things. And he was just always experimenting. I think about that a lot. I think about him versus me. And it's funny. I used to be in the basement making pots. He was sculpting or painting. We were kind of just mute, not talking to each other. He was deaf. So that was an element of it. You know, when I became a potter, I was at a bit of a crossroads of my own. I could either become a sort of art potter. and try and go into the gallery world, or I could take a more commercial route. And I'm so glad I went commercial because had I decided to become an art potter, I think I would have been much more creatively constrained. I would have had to zero in on an identifiable style and replicate it, albeit with slight variations, rinse, repeat forever in order to have a viable market. Whereas a designer, the stakes are lower. But the ability to try and fail is much greater. Speaker 1 (10:21) We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. Speaker 1 (10:28) Design Better is supported by dupe.com. I find that I do my best work when I'm in a room that feels good to be in. I like warm wood, low light, and a chair that doesn't fight me. And I love mid-century modern design because I live in a mid-century modern house. But building that room on a real budget is the hard part. dupe.com is how I've been doing it though. Paste in any product URL into dupe.com and it finds you