(bright music) - [Presenter] Welcome everyone to the "Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series."

(bright music) (audience applauding) - Welcome everyone to the "Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series."

My name is Chrisstina Hamilton, the Series Director.

Today, we bring you uncommon, razor focus, someone who knew what he loved, making with clay, and stuck to it regardless of everything else, interior designer, potter, and author, Jonathan Adler.

Yes, you're very lucky today, people, very lucky.

I wanna thank our partners for their generous support today.

We have Design Core Detroit, Detroit PBS, PBS Books, WNET's ALL ARTS, and Michigan Public 91.7 FM.

Now, turning to our guest today, Jonathan Adler's brain is a cultural blender.

His influences are vast.

High, low, and everything in between, from Isamu Noguchi's organic modern sculptures to raunchy 1970s bumper stickers.

The end result?

A design brand, pottery, furniture, and more, which marries chic design with irreverent references.

I thought I had a last page.

Adler has built, as you all may be well aware, an international reputation for his innovative approach to design, and he has appeared as a judge on two seasons of "Bravo's Top Design" and later served as a judge on HGTV's "Design Star: Next Gen," and in 2019 received the Brand Heritage Award at the Fashion Group International's annual "Night of the Stars Gala," among other accolades, including the MAD Visionary Award from the Museum of Art and Design, where there is currently an exquisite retrospective of his work on display.

I hope some of you have been to see it.

It does close this Sunday.

We hope that Cranbrook should be hosting it soon.

So if you see anyone from there, put it in their ear.

And now, please welcome to the stage, Jonathan Adler.

(audience applauding) - Wowzers.

Thank you guys so much for coming out tonight.

This is not my typical Thursday night, not every potter gets to tell his story like I'm about to, and I sincerely appreciate it, and I hope I make it worth the price of admission, which I know was nothing.

So, you know, you get what you pay for.

I'm going to tell you guys about my life and career, the ups, the downs, my lifelong passion for clay and design.

It'll be a little bit of a collage of my aesthetic, the way I developed my voice.

I think you'll probably see, you'll probably come away from the night feeling sort of like you saw something very inspiring and colorful, and that would be a misreading of my career.

The correct reading is that it's a cautionary tale.

If you knew all the struggles and mishigas and work and ups and downs, you would never embark on what I crazily embarked on 32 years ago, but here we go.

I'm going to tell you all about my world.

I am a potter.

I have always been a potter, and it is at the very essence of how I see the world.

And let's go back to how it all began.

(all laughing) That is moi becoming a man at my bar mitzvah when I was 13, is of course when, you know, one becomes a man.

And, you know, there I am sort of looking into the future, imagining this great life for myself, and there I am (chuckles) with all the girls who are attending my bar mitzvah.

And I think the subtext of this photo, which is in my cordovan, leather-bound, gold-tipped bar mitzvah album from 1979.

I think the subtext is that like, these are, you know, I see some ladies tonight who should be having my babies.

Like, this was, you know, like it was supposed to be like, you know, here's my future with all the ladies.

Spoiler alert, I was not seeing it that way, and I was not thinking about the ladies so much.

What I was really thinking about was clay.

I am weird.

When I went to summer camp when I was 12 years old, the summer before I became a man, I went there thinking I would just, you know, be like a normal kid and I would emerge a tan and fit little soccer player, but I ended up the summer as a pasty potter who fell in love with clay the very second he touched it.

and then I spent my adolescence in an improbable way.

I begged my parents for a wheel and kiln and I got it as a gift for my bar mitzvah, so thank you.

And I created a makeshift studio in the basement of our house and I just made pots all the time.

And looking back, it seems so odd and I don't think I was like a loser or a freak, but I must have been.

And when normal kids would be hanging out by the mailbox waiting for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition, I was hanging out by my mailbox waiting for the newest issue of "Ceramics Monthly" or "American Craft Magazine."

And I became not just a passionate potter, but a voracious fan of pottery and craft and clay.

And I'd almost feel like, I don't know, I feel like when you look back at your life, it's hard to believe the different eras you went through that formed you, but it feels like a different era.

Like I was just a weird kid who would run home from school, go to the basement, and make pots.

And my dad, who was a lawyer, he would, actually, at the end of the day, he would leave his law practice and race home and paint and sculpt.

So, there's something in the air.

Let me go back.

Before I get to the next slide, I'll tell you a little bit about the next steps in my Odyssey.

I went to Brown for school and didn't really know what I wanted to do, and, you know, I was taking classes in media and all that kind of stuff, but I was lucky to go and take classes at RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design, next door.

So I took pottery classes in school and maintained my love of clay.

At the end of my time, I went to my professor at RISD and said, "You know what?

I think I want to get my MFA.

Do you think I have what it takes?"

Like, you know, let's do this.

And she was like, "No."

(audience laughing) She was basically like, "You suck.

This isn't your calling, like, you know, go be a lawyer like your dad or whatever."

And it was devastating, as you can imagine.

Now come with me in the wilderness of my journey, where it gets cold and sad.

Don't worry, it has a happy ending.

But there's some wilderness years, when I stopped making pots and thought I need to be a proper adult and get a job.

And so, I got out of school, I moved to New York, stopped making pots, and got a job working in the mailroom of a talent agency, thinking, all right, I'll become a movie producer.

I didn't know what I was doing.

And I was... Well, I wasn't sort of like the best employee because I started having an affair with my boss, and then... (audience laughing) Not only did I have an affair with my boss, but then I had a side affair with a fellow assistant at the talent agency, and so I got fired.

As I should have once my boss found out he was like, "You're fired" and I was like, "You're completely right."

And he was right.

And then I got another job and I went to a talent agent, another talent agency, rinse and repeat, started having an affair with my boss, (audience laughing) and we both got fired.

(audience laughing) So at this point, I'm like 24, I'm 25, broke, and then I got another job, but this time I was like, all right, I think I see a pattern here.

I'm gonna work for a woman.

And so I did.

I worked for a female movie producer, and after six months, I was fired again, but this time for just absolute incompetence.

And suddenly, I was 26.

This is the wilderness period.

Don't despair, it's a happy ending.

I was 26, and I was unemployed, and I was broke, and I was sort of, you know, my parents were sort of meeting out a little bit of a few shekels here and there to get me through the month.

And I sort of thought, oh, you know what?

What I really always wanted to be was a potter, and a life, like a normie life, working a proper job, obviously is not for me, and maybe I should just to go back to what I loved and not seek the approval of my pottery teacher, but just make what I wanted to make.

And I thought, "All right, I'm going to do this."

I understood that I was embarking on a life of penury, and that was fine.

You know, I was like, all right, this is sort of, you know, I'm going to listen to the universe.

It's told me I'm not fit for purpose in the workplace.

However, I do have something that I care passionately about, and it was clay.

And so I was like, "All right, that's what I'm going to do.

I'm gonna make some pots."

And so I started teaching night classes at a pottery studio in Hell's Kitchen in New York and made work during the day.

And when I started making these pots, I kind of thought, all right, in the past I'd always made pots I wanted to, you know, please my professor or whatever, whatever.

I just thought I need to do this for myself.

I need to just make what I wanna make.

And I realized what I wanted to make was very different from what typical pottery was.

So, close your eyes and think of a potter, right?

There's your typical potter, you know, sequestered in a garret in Vermont, never shaving anything on his body, hair never being cut.

You know, so that's your typical potter.

And I knew I didn't wanna be him, this poor man who was in some stock photo that I caged off the web.

Sorry, (laughs) I hope nobody knows him.

(audience laughing) Anyway, I knew I didn't want to be this poor man and I knew I didn't want to make pots like these.

I didn't want to make pots that were sort of sloppy and unresolved looking to me and kind of sad.

I wanted to make pots that were like this, that were graphic and light and colorful.

And so that's when I started to make, and I got really into it.

And my parents were still kind of supporting me, I was 27 at this point.

(chuckles) Thanks.

One of my main regrets in life is never having the opportunity to truly thank my dad for putting me through college and, you know, helping me out with rent sometimes.

Anyway, I was making pots like this, and I was really getting into it.

I was truly finding my voice as an adult, independent potter who was going to embark on a life of penury and I imagined hawking my wares at rain soaked craft fairs as long as I got to make what I wanted to make, which was this.

And my parents said, "All right, we've been supporting you.

Like, are you gonna sell a pot or not?"

And I went to the buyer at the gift shop at the Museum of Art and Design, at the time it was called the American Craft Museum, and she took my stuff on consignment.

So that was the first pot I ever sold was to the Museum of Art and Design.

And then through a friend, I met a buyer at Barney's and got an order from Barney's, which was like epic.

Like it was not how I saw things going.

It was sort of a mind-blowing chapter to have gotten this order from Barney's.

And I thought, wow, I have an opportunity.

I was penniless and I didn't really have any opportunities and I was really an outsider.

And I thought, wow, I'm going to throw myself into this.

I'm going to make pots and they were pots like this.

They were graphic and stripey.

And suddenly I went from kind of being a slacker to working like 80 hours a week.

Is that a lot?

I think that's a lot, like 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

And by the way, that's a teapot that I was making when I was at RISD, that when I got rejected, I'm just showing it because I think it's fabulous.

It was at the time I was very... I was like 21, I was obsessed with rap music and fashion, so this was inspired by a Chanel teapot, and with gold chains like rap, and it was really great.

I don't know why I didn't get into grad school, but whatever, that was a long time ago.

(audience laughing) So, I was making them stripey pots that you saw before that were bright and colorful.

And at the time, I was working in a hippy-dippy, pottery, like commune in downtown New York, where my rent was 250 bucks a month.

And I worked with these, there were like five other potters, we shared this space, it was cheaper times.

And they were incredibly sweet, and I feel like I'm being negative, but here goes.

They were incredibly sweet, but each and every one was a different kind of cautionary tale.

They had all been making the same kind of pots forever, and each of them had had a moment of success and then kind of faded.

And as I watched my fellow potters, I thought to myself, you know what, I have to change.

I must not get stuck in a rut.

I need to keep evolving, and like, you know, I needed to be the shark of potters, I needed to always keep moving.

And so I really had the opportunity to think, what was my work about?

Like, what were these pots about?

They were, yes, they were bright and colorful, but I have a very strong sense that things should be very resolved, and they're about geometry and silhouette, and in this case, the stripes really accentuate the silhouette of the pot.

And so I thought, I can take that same idea of pattern and apply it to texture.

So this is a collection of pots that really, in which I address the very same aesthetic issues, but just in a different way.

Whereas the other pots, like the shapes were accentuated by the bold stripes.

In this case, the shapes are really accentuated by stripes that are textural.

And this was just a different body of work.

And that kind of really started me thinking that I need to keep always evolving and changing, which I think is what I have done, I'm proud to say.

Here's just a little window into how the sausage is made and an example of a collection.

These are some pots that are again about, it's again, it's about form and geometry and how to sort of take a form, add a layer of geometry to accentuate the shape.

So I threw these pieces and then added these patterns that kind of wax and wane in scale with the form of the pot.

And these are the finished pieces.

They kind of reminded me of grenades.

So I glazed them in this matte black militaristic glaze.

And those are the grenade vases.

And again, they address the exact same aesthetic issues I have always been obsessed with, which are geometry and kind of resolving forms to make them look just like I think they should look.

I've also always kind of had a contrary nature and have always tried to think about things in a different way.

I don't know if I've tried or it's just, it's how I see things.

It's like, I think it's a family thing.

My whole family are lawyers, law professors, judges, and everybody just kind of sees things in a weird way.

So these are some ceramic animals.

And ceramic animals are considered kitsch.

Like, they've always sort of been looked down upon by people in the serious ceramic world.

The very serious ceramic world from which I was rejected, mind you.

(all laughing) I'm truly not bitter, I'm just, whatever.

(audience laughing) So anyway, so I thought, well, why should ceramic animals be seen as kitsch?

Like, animals are fantastic.

And so this is what I call my menagerie collection in which I sort of take the forms of animals and strip them down to their very essence, their very minimal, and then just add a layer of pattern on top that accentuates the form.

So it's the exact same concerns done in animals.

And here, this is what I call my muse collection, and it has kind of a funny genesis.

All the stuff that I was making was abstract, and one day I was sitting at the dining room table with my husband and I had a group of pots sitting that I thought were just gorgeous.

However, my husband is a window dresser.

Yes, my husband is a window dresser.

And (chuckles) when you live with a window dresser, there will be mannequin parts lying around.

That is one of the things that happens.

So I was sitting at the dining room table and my husband, Simon, like there was my beautiful pots in the background and there was a mannequin head in the foreground, and my eye just kept being drawn to the mannequin head, and it was sort of a eureka moment.

I thought, abstract pots, who cares?

Things need to be representational.

When I look at something, I wanna see a face looking back at me.

So that was really how I kind of conceived of this collection, the Muse collection, and it's gone on to really be something I've sort of explored throughout my very long career, 32 years, and it's evolved in myriad ways.

And these pots are just sort of very, very simple faces and body parts that I hope look very ethereal and perfect.

And I hope they look uncovered rather than created.

I think that's a vibe that I strive to achieve.

And I feel like with the Muse collection, it's so resolved.

It looks to me like it was uncovered rather than created.

Breast-esses.

(audience laughing) You know, it's funny, again, I'm a one-trick pony.

Everything's about form and coming up with different geometric or graphic treatments to accentuate the form.

In this case, it's breast that kind of wax and wane with the shape.

This is a huge vessel and it's great and ethereal.

And here are more pieces from the Muse collection.

I keep playing with this group and expanding it into lots of different body parts and faces and shapes.

And because it's white and ethereal and perfect, I always treated it with tremendous reverence.

It seemed like wholly adjacent.

And that is not how I think anything should be.

And the minute someone wanted me to sign a pot on the face of the pot, and I was like, "No, I could never deface that pot."

"This is holy, it's white, it's ethereal."

And at that moment, I was like, "Wait, no, there's nothing that shouldn't be defaced.

"Everything must be defaced.

"Nothing is sacred in my work, not in the world, "but in my work, I just thought I should never grow so attached to something that I treat it as sacred."

So, I started to take the Muse collection and add different kind of signs and symbols to it in gold, third eye, tears earned from a prison murder, Here's another group that, again, being irreverent was something that I previously treated reverentially.

So there's this picture that has a Bowie lightning bolt over the eye, or I did a lollipop holder from a punk rock dude with a mohawk.

One of the things that I think is, I guess, inevitable for me, albeit maybe not for every potter, is that in addition to form and aesthetics, I've always been a bit of a culture junkie.

I'm sort of very interested and obsessed with contemporary pop culture, not contemporary pop culture.

And I always think that the things I make shouldn't just be objects, they should also say something and communicate something.

So I think you'll see that in a lot of my work, I'm sort of exploring, I hope, exploring ideas and obsessions through pots.

These are really cute.

These are just, I call these "les amis."

They're just a bunch of friends that I made that are colorful, and sometimes I think there's a lot to be said from having sort of a childlike sense of optimism.

Spoiler alert, I am not optimistic, I'm a deeply pessimistic person.

I think my nature is kind of dichotomous, and you'll probably maybe see it in my work a little bit.

You'd certainly see it in myself if you got to know me.

I'm a very, very, like kind of brooding and analytical and even pessimistic person, but it's funny, I have sort of a pessimistic outlook, but an optimistic output.

And there's this book I read recently by the historian Paul Johnson, who, it's called "Intellectuals," and it's about a group of... So he sort of analyses a bunch of different intellectual superstars, like Karl Marx and Rousseau, and sort of talks about how their nature was very different from what we know them as.

So for instance, Karl Marx, man of the people, you know, workers' rights, basically had an unpaid slave his entire life.

And Rousseau, who was all about the optimism of nature and the majesty of children, basically abandoned like 75 children in a Paris orphanage.

And whilst I would never put myself, you know, at that level of thinker, I thought it really resonated with me, that idea of how different someone's output is from their outlook.

These are just some new pots that I really, really love.

They are about... They're kind of just about trying to achieve beautiful, organic, modernist forms.

All right, so back to... I just want to see how I'm doing here.

Back to my evolution, my career.

As I said, I always wanted to zig and zag and evolve, and I realized at some point that I needed to move beyond pots.

And, you know, so I started to make pillows, and in this case, these are a bunch of needlepoint pillows.

And again, it's that same idea of taking something that is derided and like needlepoint, which was considered very granny, and sort of reimagining it and rethinking it.

And I think that's been, you know, I'm very glad I chose pottery as my medium, because whilst it's become cool in later years, when I started it could not have been less cool.

And ditto Needlepoint.

And actually ditto my husband, Simon Doonan, who was the creative director of Barneys.

I told you he was a window dresser, but being a window dresser was a really looked down upon kind of field.

It was almost a joke field, but he turned it into art.

So there's a lot to be said for finding something low and distasteful and reimagining it, like ceramic animals.

This is cool, as I've evolved, I've... Oh yeah.

(laughs) I play with erotica in my work, but also, as I've evolved, I've had the lucky opportunity to work in many different media.

The world has opened up since I began.

Like I started out as just a dude with a potter's wheel and clay.

Like, when I started, I was in the most sort of primitive, elemental situation one could ever find oneself in.

One person, mud, water, fire.

That's what being a potter is.

And over the years, as my world and business has grown, I've had the chance to work in lots of different materials, which has been really mind-expanding.

and these are some pieces I make in brass.

And I love working in different materials because it affords me different opportunities for expression.

So these brass bird bowls, which were a total bomb at retail, and I think they're some of the best things I've ever done, are really about working in a different material, in this case metal, in which I could use the material to create different shapes, in this case, much more sinuous and attenuated forms.

Like I could never do something so thin and fragile in clay.

So it's really fun for me to work in different media.

Including Lucite and resin.

I do, I don't know if I have them in this slide presentation, but I do lots of sculptures in Lucite, which is, again, another very exciting and unexpected twist for a potter because clay is opaque and Lucite is not opaque.

And so it's very fun for me to rethink things.

And I play a lot with drug iconography.

And it's a very odd thing for me because I'm about as clean living as a person could be.

I don't drink, I don't take drugs, I'm incredibly bourgeois, but I've sort of always thought that in my work, I should let my age run free and I should not try to, I should sort of just do whatever I'm interested in.

And I've always been obsessed with the counterculture because I think the counterculture really, in some ways, made my life possible.

You know, it led to gay rights and sort of the idea of craftspeople as artists, and it had so many positive things.

But it also, there were sort of, the counterculture led to people living wild lives.

and I never have done that.

And so in a funny way, I've explored my wild side vicariously in my work.

Just some more cute pots, animals.

As you'll see, I work in just lots of different patterns and colors, always changing.

Blue.

Blue is my favorite hue.

I just thought we needed to give it a little shout out here.

Blue is the best.

And I guess I should talk a little bit about my business as well, because you've seen here that I've moved on from pots.

So over the years, I gradually built this cottage industry and moved on from making everything myself to making maquettes and models in my studio and finding different workshops to produce things.

And I opened a retail store, and then I opened more retail stores.

My wholesale business kept growing.

And it all happened quite accidentally, as you can tell.

Like, I really mean it when I say I had no plan.

And just kind of one foot in front of the other figured it out.

And so I've evolved.

I took a lot of the same concerns that you'll see in my pottery work show up in different materials.

This really cool group of furniture called the Reform Collection that's actually inspired by the organic modernist architecture of reformed temples.

Those of you who, you know, any of my brethren in the house might be familiar with the kind of organic modernist '60s crafty vibe of reformed synagogues.

And that was the inspiration for this group of cabinets and furniture.

And they're fantastic.

This is what I call the reform lamp.

It is, again, exploring organic modernism and trying to play with asymmetry and create a sense of balance and dynamism.

And I just kind of want everything I do to look very, very resolved and tight.

And I think this piece is great.

A total bomb at retail.

Nobody wanted it, and I think it might be one of the best things I've ever done.

So, pro tip, haunt the sales section of my website, you will find my absolute best stuff.

(audience laughing) Tone shift.

As a potter, who thought he was embarking on a life of penury, I decided early on that I would say yes to every opportunity.

Yes, yes, yes.

And a friend of mine asked me to design her house, and I said yes.

And so I started a career as an interior designer, completely untrained, and maybe not even good at it, but I've done a lot of it.

And yeah, it's kind of an unexpected and yet somehow inevitable part of my job because I was making all these pots and pillows and rugs and furniture and all these things and thinking as an interior designer would.

And this is the Parker Palm Springs Hotel, which is a hotel I designed in Palm Springs.

And this facade of the hotel has become quite iconic.

It sort of has a sense of place.

That's called a brise soleil, which is like a kind of a, I can't even think what it's called, sort of like a transparent fence kind of thing.

That's sort of what you think of when you think of Palm Springs architecture.

And this hotel is really cool.

When I do interior projects, I really like to create a narrative and a vibe.

So when I did the Parker, I imagined that the Parker Palm Springs, which is an incredible place, you guys should all go, it costs a fortune, it's worth it.

And it's sort of a really big property and I imagined that it was the estate of sort of an inspirational woman who I called Mrs.

Parker, and I imagine she was an Auntie Mame type of person who was well-traveled and inspirational and had collected stuff from all over the world all over the years.

And so, it was really great having a muse and a narrative, and it's something... I do the very same thing when I'm doing interior design for other people.

I kind of see interiors as like a portrait of the occupant, but I like to create interiors that reflect the owner sort of at their most glamorous and most eccentric.

As a designer, I see myself as a slimming mirror for my clients.

And this is Mrs.

Parker at her best.

And again, I like to weave content into stuff I do.

So you'll see the rug going up the staircase of the hotel is actually a quote or a knockoff of the iconic rug from "The Shining," which just kind of felt right to me because Palm Springs is a getaway for the movie biz folks.

So I'd really like to introduce content and ideas and narrative into my work, but really interiors to me are about a vibe.

I like them to be a little bit off.

It's funny, when I talk about my pots, I want them to be very tight and perfect.

I have sort of, people may think of me as a maximalist, but I'm really a minimalist.

I try to communicate what I want to communicate with a true economy of gesture.

Like I hope you'll see that in all the things that I make, that they're very pared down to their essence.

But as a designer, interior designer, I like to be a maximalist and create a vibe.

This is the restaurant at the Parker Palm Springs, which I call Mr.

Parker's, and I imagined that if Mrs.

Parker was this groovy, Auntie Mame kind of figure, and I was talking about Mrs.

Parker this, Mrs.

Parker that, so then suddenly I was like, what about Mr.

Parker?

And I imagined that he was a loose, hedonistic, roué, and that this was his lair.

So it's a tone shift, and this is Mr.

Parker's.

All right, back to me.

(audience laughing) And I'm gonna show you some of my houses.

All right, so last time you checked in with me, living in penury, a very grim future for me as a potter, married to a window dresser, tears, sadness, in the wilderness, nothing was ever gonna work out because, you know, potter and a window dresser.

But guess what?

It worked out really well and, you know, we both worked really hard and have done very well and we had a super glamorous apartment in New York City and this is it.

And it's just a really great place.

We sold it a few years ago, sadly, but it was so fantastic and it was ever-changing.

At one point, this room was the dining room, then it was a ping pong room, and I sort of became my own Auntie Mame.

And the apartment was really great and had two, it was sort of symmetrical with these double-height ceilings.

And so this was the living room, that was the dining room, which was twinkly and glamorous.

And the bedroom, how fantastic is that bedroom, you guys?

I was so lucky to live in that bedroom.

And the windows in the back faced a brick wall.

And we said, you know, really, in the spirit of not treating anything overly referentially, I think you should always think about putting pictures in front of windows.

Like, one should never treat windows as sacred, in my opinion.

So we thought, why not, when you enter, have eyes looking back at us, rather than facing a brick wall.

So, I don't know if you can see them, but the paintings in the back are done by a friend of ours called Jean-Paul Philippe, who's a brilliant painter, and they're his interpretation of eyes staring back at you when you enter the room.

The dressing room, that part was great.

Why did we sell it?

What was I thinking?

I don't know, it was done with New York.

New York spits you out at a certain point.

This is our place on Shelter Island, which is, again, a tone shift, and Shelter Island, which is in the Hamptons, we built this house, and it's sort of a very, it's a much more like low-key, rustic, modern kind of vibe.

And it's so great, I'm sort of lost in reverie just looking at it.

And this is the interior, and when doing interiors, I like to create a sense of place.

I think I mentioned to you in Palm Springs, I wanted that breeze to lay to feel Palm Springs.

I wanted the hotel to feel resonant to movie makers and entertainment industry mockers.

And in Shelter Island, the tone is more quiet and subdued.

So the color scheme and vibe for this house was really informed by the view, which is of sand and kind of the slate gray color of the sea in the Northeast.

So, you know, I think that interior should be a reflection of their owner, but also they should be in harmony or at least in dialogue with the locale.

But now let's talk about my giant banana.

(audience laughing) This is my giant banana, and it's really cool.

It's this, I guess public sculpture I made for the grounds of the Parker Palm Springs.

There was just a spot that needed a sculpture, and I was like, as a person who says yes, I was like, "Why shouldn't I make a big monumental sculpture?"

So I do these kind of banana sculptures, and I thought, "Let's blow it up to life-size."

And this is a really cool thing, because this is about the marriage of technology and craft, and I'll tell you how.

You know, as I said, I started out in the most primitive way imaginable, a man, a wheel, mud, water, fire, and technology has evolved over the years.

And so the way we made this banana was that we actually just built a scale model, I think we did it at like a quarter scale, so it was a small thing.

And then scanned it into the computer and 3D printed it to create this massive model.

And then went back, though, and sort of added texture and a sense of hand.

So this was a fascinating process for me to see how I could work with technology, but still make it feel like craft.

And as an applied artiste, I guess is what you could call me or a functional, I don't know, craft person, I like things to have a function.

So the banana, each of the peels is a seat.

They're all like at seat height and kind of comfortable.

And so it's really cool, and again, it's an interesting example of how technology and craft have evolved.

These are just some images of some of the furniture I have designed.

Furniture has been a fantastically fun medium for me to think about.

I love this, Chez.

Again, like my work in clay, often I like things to start with a very, very simple idea.

In this case, I was just like, what if I just did a serpentining thing?

What forms can I make with a serpentining kind of thing?

In this case, it's a cheslong, and it's great.

More furniture and room settings.

I play with a lot of surrealism in my work.

In this case, the cabinet is a very simple cabinet, but instead of just putting normal hardware, I sort of created a collage of different kind of surreal symbols, and it's really informed by the muse pottery I showed you guys earlier with like the defaced faces.

So I'm always kind of thinking the same way, whatever medium I'm working in, and I'm always working in eyes.

You'll see on that chair there's a beaded eye pillow.

Back to me.

This is where I live now, which is in Palm Beach in Florida, which is a really exciting and different and weird new chapter in our lives.

And our house is kind of like a folly.

So Simon, my husband and I are not giants.

We are short people.

He's even shorter than me, which is fantastic because it's given me 30 years of mockery.

I found the one person shorter than me who I can just mock all day long.

But our house, it looks very grand, but it's actually kind of a small house.

It's like 2,200 square feet and it's sort of a grandiose folly.

And, yeah.

And very colorful inside.

I think that Palm Beach sort of needs, like, color needs to be cranked up to 11 or even 12.

Like, it's just, the walls are hungry for color.

And you're sort of competing, not competing with, but you're, again, in dialogue with the light.

So, in this house, we just kind of overdosed on color.

There's my cute little mutt, Foxy Lady.

And on the wall are these beaded art pieces.

In India I found this incredible craftsperson who, he basically sees the world in beads, that's the only way I can explain it.

He can just sort of take very simple images and turn them into the most magnificent beaded expressions.

So, I do a lot of beaded artwork, and in this case I just took sort of a Renaissance portrait and kind of made it into a diptych where I cut out the background and just pictured the Renaissance lady on one side, and then on the other side, the background without the lady.

So it's again, kind of just trying to see things in a slightly different way.

Again, more color, beaded.

This is our bathroom, y'all.

How great is that?

(chuckles) It's just this, like, our bedroom is like, kind of a lilac extravaganza, and the woman with the peacock feathers in her head is made by one of my favorite artists, who is a Danish mid-century potter called Bjorn Wiinblad.

And I found this piece and just knew that it had to be staring at me as I entered our lilac bathroom.

And I knew that she had to have gigantic peacock feathers coming out of her head.

Pro tip, sometimes just forget about flowers and think about feathers.

You're welcome.

(audience laughing) So this is cool.

This is, I'll tell you, this is our dining room.

And I said to my Simon, "You know what would be fun?

This house is a folly, like what should be in a folly, but portraits of its owners."

And we were like, okay.

So instead of, we thought, what could our portrait be?

Especially given, you know, that I have this beaded artist guy.

And we were like, "You know what?

Let's make it a portrait in words."

So, here it is, Schmattas and Tchotchkes.

My Simon, who now deserves a less mocking and more salutary kind of tribute, is a fashion icon.

And he was the creative director of Barneys in addition to being the window dresser for many years.

And he's a very fashionable dude.

and he came from England.

Talk about penury, he grew up in true penury and then sort of really made it in America, which is an extraordinary story in its own right, in the world of schmattas, which is the Yiddish word for rags or clothing.

So he made it in the schmatta trade.

And I have made my career in stuff, tchotchkes.

So these are really portraits of Simon and me done in beads.

And, you know, again, it was a really fun process making these, because I knew that I wanted it to say schmattas and tchotchkes, and I knew that I wanted my beading guy to do it.

But one of the things that makes his work so spectacular is the sense of dimension.

so I kind of wanted the letters to kind of like wax or recede and pop at the same time.

So there's a sense of dynamism in the beading and again, just kind of... I just like to try to think of different ways to do things.

Schmattas, and tchotchkes, my Simon and me.

And now, MAD.

So, just to bring this full circle, you know, I told you guys it would be a zig and zag and there would be highs and there would be lows, and I'm gonna go out on a high, which is, I think I told you my very first pot that I sold was to the MAD Museum gift shop.

And they took a chance on a real outsider potter.

I had no idea what I was doing.

Like I didn't know how to price anything.

I didn't know what an invoice was.

I was just an idiot.

I didn't, sorry, I had no idea what I was doing, but MAD Museum took a chance on me.

And now, 32 years later, I have a retrospective of my work at the Museum of Art and Design.

And, right?

To me, to me.

(audience applauding) I know, it's a real heartwarming Oprah moment, but it's incredible.

It really, it was a really amazing experience putting together this show.

It's called "The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler."

And not unlike how I've had the chance to bore you guys with the story of my life, I was able to really look at the story of my life and my work in this show.

And for me, it was a fascinating experience really trying to understand what I've been doing, what I've been trying to say all these years.

When you're in business, as I'm sure many of you know, you're kind of just like trying to get through the day.

You're not thinking about what you're doing.

You're just sort of doing it.

In my case, I had like rent to pay and people to, you know, and salaries to pay.

And I've just been a really, really busy dude, like going, going, going.

But doing this show has given me such incredible insight into me, my favorite subject, and what I've been trying to say.

And one of the cool things about this show is that it's really, it's pieces from my collection in dialogue with the artists, with the works that have inspired me over the years.

So again, in full circle moment, those pots that I would sort of wait to see in my mailbox in Ceramics Monthly, by my heroes of clay, a lot of them are featured in this exhibition.

and I sort of show how their work inspired my work.

And I grouped into different buckets of work and different sort of vibes, each with a cheeky name.

One is like Animalia, in which I look at artists who worked in animals and how that inspired my work.

Authentica, which is about my more sincere modernist, organic modern side, funk, erotica, of course.

It wouldn't be right to do a show without erotica.

And it was just an incredible, incredible experience and gave me so much insight into my mad MAD world, what the hell it's been all about and what a ride it has been.

And again, I think you might come away from this being inspired, I certainly hope so, but just to go back to the beginning, mine is a cautionary tale.

It has been hell.

There have been so many downs along the way.

There have been so many struggles and so much work, but it all turned out actually kind of great in the mad MAD world.

And that is the story of me.

(audience applauding) Thank you, thank you, thank you.

(people chattering)