2015 AIGA Medalist: Dan Friedman

Increasingly disillusioned by catering to the narrow interests of large corporations, Friedman sought a more fulfilling way to contribute to society. He began spending time with artists and designers at the cafés, shops, and galleries in Soho and on the Lower East Side; it wasn’t long before he became more interested in the late-night club culture than in his day job. After a few years, he left Pentagram for good and plunged into the flamboyant downtown art scene, embracing a cacophony of influences: pop art and graffiti; rock-and-roll, hip hop, and punk music; consumer culture and fantasy—all of which propelled him forward into new modes of artistic production and cultural provocation.

Industrial designer and educator Steven Holt observed that as Friedman “began to pursue projects of personal meaning rather than professional interest at the end of the ’70s, his life increasingly took on the dimensions of an experiment rather than a career.”

Nowhere was this more obvious than in his apartment, a one-bedroom near Washington Square Park. For more than a decade, he transformed this space into a laboratory for investigating color, form, materials, and meaning. “I have, for many years, used my home to push modernist principles of structure and coherency to their wildest extreme,” Friedman said. “I create elegant mutations radiating with intense color and complexity in a world that is deconstructed into a goofy, ritualistic playground for daily life.”

Friedman was welcomed into a circle of like-minded eccentrics that included Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Kenny Scharf, Tseng Kwong Chi, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Invigorated by their diverse perspectives, energy, and optimism, Friedman entered a period of incredible invention and productivity. His apartment experiments spawned gaudy screens and an eclectic range of fantasy furniture, which carried symbolic meaning beyond basic functionality—incorporating recycled trash, raffia skirts, fetishistic symbols, and typography. He created huge, radiant, post-nuclear installations, which exhibited locally, and coauthored Cultural Geometry, Artificial Nature, and Post Human with gallerist and curator Jeffrey Deitch. And when the art community became engulfed by the AIDS crisis, he devoted his skills as a designer to AIDS activism, having lived in the shadow of the disease for a decade himself.

Friedman’s work seemed to tap into the deeper cultural shift toward postmodernism in the early ’80s—from neat to messy; from originality to appropriation, mash-up, and transmutation. His work was widely published, and particularly admired in Europe. Exhibits of his “ridiculously practical” furniture in Milan struck a chord with like-minded Italian groups such as Alchimia and Memphis. Numerous commissions followed, for which Friedman—working through various artisans—created ceramic, glass, laminate, and metal objects. In Paris, he was represented by Galerie Neotu, which produced several limited editions, including his Truth chair and the outrageous Zoid sofa. Both his art and design work have been acquired by private collectors and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Throughout his career, Friedman tried to reconcile what he was experiencing as a designer and artist with the original pro-social, positivistic tenants of modernism, which he felt had lost its moral authority as designers began to sell it as corporate style. Near the end his life, Friedman summed up this reconciliation in his impressive book, Dan Friedman: Radical Modernism, in which he offers an updated version of modernism that accommodates a more inclusive and expressive formal language reflective of the exhilarating, chaotic, and dangerous reality of the life he then led.

Friedman’s life and work reflect not only his impeccable formal standards, but also an exquisite attention to philosophical and ethical values that are more relevant than ever in the contemporary design profession. His recognition as an AIGA Medalist provides a poignant reminder of how his ideas and advocacy have enlarged our understanding of what design can be, and his eclectic, evolving career offers an intriguing model for a practice that can be far more open, culturally relevant, and self-directed.