Hide & Seek

A look inside the painterly studio of Avo’s Brit Kleinman, the leather maven bringing the world together one textile at a time.

Written by Jesse Bratter

Photographed by Alison Engstrom

Every morning, Brit Kleinman wakes up and reads the news while her architect husband exercises his first-rights-to-shower privileges. She eats breakfast, enjoying a cup of homemade cold-brewed coffee on the most sweltering of Brooklyn summer days. When the weather turns cool, she’ll instead take a walk with her other half to grab a cup of joe on the way to work, all the while looking for inspiration along the tree-lined streets of Fort Greene, where generals and ship captains of the past once lived. She makes her way down the hill to her studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a storied piece of real estate on the water’s edge stretching from Dumbo to Williamsburg, the Manhattan skyline rising majestically from just across the river. It’s a place where they used to build and anchor ships and where they are still repaired today. Downstairs in the industrial building that houses her studio, there’s a metal fabricator, a nod to the property’s previous life as a blacksmithing shop in the early 1900s.

Inside, it’s immediately clear that this is an artist’s lair. Beneath the sloped ceiling and giant white rafters, the shelves are lined with dyes and cutting tools, and rolling carts overflow with piles of leathers. Natural light floods the space, and one wall serves as as an enormous inspiration board, covered from top to bottom with leather swatches. Kleinman is, after all, the creative force behind Avo, a bespoke hand-dyed leather atelier where time-honored techniques meet modern-day aesthetics in the form of rugs, pillows and, as of late, floor and wallcoverings, all informed by the material itself. With mind-stimulating podcasts streaming in the background—Freakonomics, Clever, All Songs Considered — Kleinman allows the leather to guide her brushstrokes, rarely feeling the need to sketch out her patterns before making the first mark. “Each hide is different in size and shape,” she says. “Especially with geometric patterns, we tweak the proportions each time and use different line qualities so that it looks just right.”

Working mainly with tanneries in Mexico, Brazil, Italy and Spain, the full-grain leathers Kleinman uses as a canvas include a mix of vegetable-tanned, aniline and chrome-tanned hides, rendered in rich shades of blue, gray and warm pink, with pearl and metallic finishes that shift depending on the light and evolve over time. Struck by the fact that leather can be either a basic commodity or a luxury, according to how it’s used—on your shoes, in your car, on an upholstered seat in a restaurant or office, or in the home—she saw an opportunity to explore the material and think of new ways to interpret it. “In the home, leather is typically stuck in a man cave as part of a cowboy scene. I personally find my aesthetic in the middle of those things, having worked in men’s fashion,” says the artist, who studied industrial design at RISD and then cut her teeth in the fashion world working at Jack Spade.

Kleinman traces her fascination with leather to some of its early historical uses. To the 16th century, when leather tiles were used in chapels to dampen the sound and warm the space, and to the Plains Indians, who used pattern to communicate messages denoting marriage status or to depict their villages. “The Plains Indians had rawhide envelope bags painted with bold graphic motifs of mountains and riverscapes that were representative of their surroundings,” she says. While she was in college, a trip to Guatemala allowed her to collaborate with local artisans there, and her fascination grew for looking at different cultures through the lens of one particular element—art, cooking, even something as simple as a wallet. It inspired her to start a blog called The Way We Carry, an image database reflecting street markets she’d come across during her travels. “Just being in Guatemala, looking at how color was used in clothing or how people there would carry things on their heads, there was that moment when it clicked for me,” she says. “We’re all the same humans but the way we express that throughout time has evolved in different places.”

This sort of anthropological way of thinking drives her current leather work, and she’s even translated her designs into a smaller scale by partnering on a limited edition series with Sabah, artisanal shoemakers who craft hand-stitched leather slippers using traditional Turkish techniques. But as much as her designs are informed by world travel, she says it’s important to find inspiration in everyday life as well. Where past creations have referenced her research into other cultures, her 2017 collection In Context takes its cues from that morning walk to her studio. Scaffolding, paint-peeling brick walls and weathered water towers have been transformed into batiks and block prints, all rendered on leather textiles using curable dyes hand-applied with sponges or good old-fashioned paintbrushes.

Kleinman’s latest obsession is a category she was surprised by: leather tiles, or rather, interior cladding and surface design in general, having debuted wall tiles and flooring this past spring at ICFF in New York City. “I’m especially excited by the smaller parts that make a whole, the little tiles of pattern that create a larger landscape,” she says. Like in those churches from the 16th century, “they dampen sound really well and have an inherent warmth.” With successful collaborations under her belt—the aforementioned Sabah, Ladies & Gentlemen Studio and recent furniture pieces with Asher Israelow, for instance—she’s excited to launch a series of concrete tiles this fall as part of a capsule collection along with various other artists and designers.

For now, it’s lunchtime, so Kleinman and her team grab their Home Depot buckets, head down to the water and take a seat on the pails. They’ll eat while looking out over the river, like all those generals and ship captains who came before them. And then they’ll return to the studio to paint another hide.