The Walker Art Center celebrates the joyful spirit and enduring impact of Memphis with a curated selection of works featured in Idea House 3, its recently launched design store concept. The Memphis design movement, created by the collective Memphis Milano in 1980, is characterized by its bold, playful colors, juxtaposition of patterns, and streamlined geometries. When it first premiered in 1981 at the prestigious Salone del Mobile global design showcase, it caused an immediate uproar as an affront to the prevailing minimalist aesthetics.
Despite its controversial beginnings, Memphis design has come to be recognized for its innovative visual vocabulary, embrace of new material and manufacturing technologies, and ongoing influence across art, design, and fashion. Today, Memphis has a dedicated collecting base and has been celebrated in cultural institutions and across runways around the world. In Idea House 3, the Walker offers a capsule collection, titled Nonconformist Furniture: Memphis Group, with works by key figures from the collective that are available for purchase as well as a selection of important books on the movement and related topics.
“Courageously bringing together simple shapes in unexpected scales and compositions, Memphis challenged the notion of good design and made loud, bold, and in instances humorous pieces,” said Asli Altay, Head of Communications and Content and Director of Design Programming at the Walker. “I believe in injecting joy and nonsense into our domestic spaces, and that the seemingly irrelevant can become relevant in the service of happiness. And the Memphis pieces do this beautifully and unapologetically.”
Memphis Milano was led by influential, pathbreaking Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) and featured other notable architects, designers, and scholars, including Barbara Radice, Nathalie du Pasquier, Martine Bedin, Shiro Kuramata, Andrea Branzi, Aldo Cibic, Michele de Lucchi, Matteo Thun, Alessandro Mendini, and Masanori Umeda, among others. The vision for Memphis style was born during a party hosted by Sottsass for a group of colleagues who were interested in advancing an aesthetic that contrasted with the clean lines and palettes of Modernism. The movement’s name references the song, “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” by Bob Dylan, which played during the evening. Although the movement, and collective behind it, only produced work for six years, until 1987, it resulted in an incredible array of furniture pieces, textiles, and design objects, spurred by mass production and that combined kitschy playfulness and over-the-top ornamentation. The group left an indelible mark on design history and artistic innovation.
The Memphis works featured in Idea House 3 capture the essence of this innovative and playful design movement and highlight works by a range of the collective’s notable contributors. Among the highlights are:
- Royal Couch by Nathalie du Pasquier in collaboration with George J. Sowden. The frame of the day bed is made in plastic laminate—a new material technology actively embraced by the Memphis movement—and the cushion is covered in a patterned cotton fabric. The frame beautifully captures the group’s engagement with simply shapes, combined to interesting effects, while the cushions celebrate a collision of colors and patterns.
- Bay Lamp by Ettore Sottsass, which reflects both the Memphis spirit and Sottsass’s own signature style of stacking geometrical forms into singular and unexpected compositions. The lamp consists of two discs stacked on top of each other on a column made of spheres and cones. The warm glow of the light creates the sense that the discs are floating over the elegant forms.
- Super Lamp by Martine Bedin, which features six colorful sockets and blubs set atop a lacquered fiberglass semi-circle on four wheels. The resulting effect is an object of both function and play as it simultaneously resembles a car and a dinosaur. It can be rolled on its wheels or dragged like a pet on a leash. The work encapsulates the critical element of fun in the Memphis vocabulary.
- Palace Chair by George J. Snowden is among the more muted of Memphis pieces, establishing a clear bridge between the Modernist furniture that dominated design dialogues and the boisterous and rebellious vision of Memphis. The frame of the chair reflects clean simple lines and forms, but it bursts with compelling color and pattern.
About Idea House 3
The Walker Art Center launched Idea House 3 in fall 2023 as a new retail platform within the institution focused on groundbreaking design. It features the work of an international cadre of leading and emerging designers and celebrate design experimentation and innovation. With 1,500 square-foot, the design concept store is organized to suggest different rooms in a home, with hand-picked furniture, lighting, tableware, textiles, and a wide array of design objects presented to capture how one might live with the works on view. Objects in Idea House 3 are selected for their singularity and craftsmanship, with a special focus on single and special edition pieces as well as new works exclusive to the store. To support its vision to present a diverse range of makers, the Walker will regularly invite design experts and creatives from across disciplines to curate the “Guest Room” of Idea House 3, exploring different themes and bringing a depth of perspectives to the space. The establishment of Idea House 3 adds a compelling new chapter to the long legacy of design within the Walker’s multidisciplinary program, which can be traced to its earliest days as a public institution. The creation of Idea House 3 is being led by Asli Altay, the Head of Communications and Content and Director of Design Programming at the Walker, as well as Felice Clark, the Walker’s Director of Business Development.