Sarah Rich is a writer, editor, and brand consultant based in Oakland, California. She’s written about design and food for publications like Dwell, The Atlantic, Wired, and Fast Company. With Wendy MacNaughton, Debbie Millman, and Maria Popova, she recently edited Leave Me Alone with the Recipes, book about the art, life and cooking of graphic designer Cipe Pineles. I first came to Sarah’s work when she was editor of Reform, a Medium publication that looked at design in the widest sense. In this episode, Sarah and I talk about how she started writing about design, the beginning and ending of Reform and the challenges in supporting design writing, and thinking about design less as objects and more as lenses through which to see the world.
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Robert Wiesenberger is a curator and historian of modern and contemporary art, design, and architecture. He is currently the Associate Curator of Special Projects at The Clark Art Institute and on the faculty at Williams Graduate Program in Art History. He previously was a curatorial fellow at the Harvard Art Museum where he worked with the Bauhaus collection and co-authored, with David Reinfurt, the 2017 monograph on Muriel Cooper. In this episode, Jarrett and Robert talk about the role of the object in art history, blurring the lines between design and art practices, and teaching design history.
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Jarrett Earnest is an artist and writer. His book, What It Means To Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics, was released in 2018 and features longform interviews with art writers, historians, theorists, and critics. Jarrett’s writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Village Voice, Vulture, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. In this episode, the Jarretts talk about the strange similarities in their work, the differences between writing about art and design, and the value in having deep conversations about art.
Spencer Bailey is a writer, editor, and journalist. He is the co-founder of the media company The Slowdown and the author of the book In Memory of: Designing Contemporary Memorials. He’s also editor-at-large for Phaidon, contributing editor at Town and Country and was previously the editor-in-chief at Surface. In this episode, Jarrett and Spencer talk about the design of memorials, how he started writing about design and architecture, and how design fits into The Slowdown’s mission.
