GRAY AWARDS: JUDGE
LEGENDS
JONATHAN ADLER Jonathan Adler—former potter turned face of his wildly popular, namesake design house—spent the last year and a half at his home on New York’s Shelter Island, enraptured by nature. “From the technicolor fantasies of the sunsets to the puffy white clouds in the sky to the animals poking around outside, I’ve been soaking it all in,” he says. Known for his highvoltage glam aesthetic (lots of color, intricate details, and metallic accents), Adler reveals that much of his work actually pays homage to the “floating hazy dreamscape of Mother Nature.” A quixotic state of mind has allowed Adler to turn a childhood love of pottery into a multifaceted design company with retail locations across the globe, a robust portfolio of residential and commercial 48
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projects, and a booming wholesale business. After a brief stint in the entertainment industry, Adler returned to the wheel in the early ‘90s, eventually launching his first ceramics collection in 1993 at Barneys New York. Within five years, he had expanded into the home-furnishings market and opened his own boutique. Since then, the scope of Adler’s career has become vast and varied. His playful approach and insistence that design shouldn’t take itself too seriously comes through in many of his pieces; perhaps best-known is the Vice collection, a set of porcelain canisters emblazoned with cheeky labels such as “Weed,” “Prozac,” and “Puppy Uppers.” Adler’s design expertise and
effervescence are captured in the multiple books he’s authored, and in the former Bravo design-competition series Top Design, for which he served as a judge. In September 2021, Adler opened his tenth retail location in the New Jersey American Dream shopping center’s new luxury wing, where an atrium features towering topiaries modeled after his Muse collection. Adler still spends time in his pottery studio, continuing to embrace an analog mindset in an increasingly digital world. After 27 years, his ethos remains unflinching: to be, as he says, “unabashedly yourself and not apologize for it.” h
COURTESY JONATHAN ADLER
By Jen Woo
