THE FUTere of the past

Across the street from my studio in Tribeca, an early twentieth-century building was slowly losing its face. Sixteen pieces of carved ornament came off the facade, one by one, headed for the trash. I asked if I could keep them.

For a year and a half they lived with me in the studio. I sat with them and tried to understand what they held: a city built and rebuilt, many cultures and many hands pressed into stone, and the quiet question of what happens to the past once it’s taken down.

The Future of the Past is what came from that time. It’s a collection of tables, a chair, and sculptural objects. Some carry the original stone, and others hold only its memory, translated into lacquered wood in deep red, dark purple, and black. Hard and soft, old and new.