Victoria Camblin: How did you wind up in Portugal?

Dozie Kanu: I entered the creative field through the context of, let’s say, “collectible design.” I was working in an interior design studio in Chelsea while I was still studying, which was a blessing. I was going to see all of these exhibitions in that neighborhood — before work, after work, during my lunch break — and realized that putting together exhibitions was where my heart wanted to be. The collectible design world was not allowing me to do that. People would ask me to make things in different colors and different sizes to fit in certain spaces, functional furniture for someone’s home, but I wasn’t truly expressing myself. So I made this kind of rebellious or drastic move. I relocated to Portugal, to the countryside. I found an abandoned warehouse owned by an elderly farmer who offered it to me at a price I could easily manage, especially compared to my monthly Greenpoint rent. With the Hublot Design Prize win fresh behind me, I had 50,000 Swiss francs, which was more than enough to start transforming that forgotten space.

Attractive math.

Agreed. I used a portion of that money to renovate the warehouse. I converted one half of it into a living space and the other into a full-blown workshop. I built a lofted bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a little office space. That was in fall 2018. It’s proven to be one of the smartest decisions I’ve ever made. Although I am in intense isolation.

Are you getting the itch?

I definitely didn’t foresee that I’d be based there as long as I have. The first few years I was there, I made a strategic effort to choose my projects carefully within the context of fine art. After doing that for four or five years, the Knoll project sprang up out of nowhere after Jonathan [Olivares] was appointed [SVP of Design]. I was worried that it would throw me backward in some capacity. Like, I would be betraying the diligence I had developed within myself or diminish the work I had done to not be categorized in the collectible design conversation. But searching through the Knoll archive and seeing people like Noguchi in there, who was and still is very much acknowledged as an artist, I realized my fear was unwarranted. So I jumped right into the project. It’s called the Dozie Kanu Table Collection.

You studied set design, originally. The Knoll tables have a little bit of theatricality to them, in the stripped leather “curtains.”

Yes, but I’m proud of the fact that I was able to subtly insert some autobiography [into the collection] with that design gesture. My parents are Nigerian immigrants. I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. Tassels are very Texas, but they are also related to African masquerades and those dried grass, straw, and vegetable-fiber skirts that flow freely. I’m touching on two very central pieces of who I am and how I was raised in a subtle way. I thought bringing my personal experiences in America into this collection would be an appropriate first entry into making mass-produced objects.

When I heard about the Knoll project, I was surprised it wasn’t a collection of chairs. All of my notes for this interview are about chairs. You strike me as a chair guy.

That’s funny because I thought my first collection with Knoll would include chairs. But I understand why they didn’t throw me that bone. Chairs are obviously the holy grail of design. Over the course of some years, they’ll introduce new colorways from my table collection to maintain fresh energy. And contractually, I will get royalties from this project for the remainder of its production, which will provide some financial stability that I don’t think I’ve ever had. I feel like I’m living in the future of the kid that moved to New York to pursue a creative career. Somehow, it’s all panning out.

Using the commercial collaborations to fund the conceptual stuff — that, to me, is the “holy grail.” Especially if you can find ways to work your creative agenda into that commercial setting.

I like to call it “putting the medicine in the dessert.” the first prototypes of this Knoll project were actually made with rebar. I thought rebar could symbolize a conceptual restructuring, or a critique of structure in some sense.

A critique of structure even?

Yeah. But Knoll has such a streamlined tubular-steel production pipeline. And Jonathan Olivares, a person I consider a coach or a spirit guide, was adamant about distilling the idea of these objects down so that the product could be digested with ease and clarity. And using tubular steel would simplify production costs and allow the tables to be accessibly priced within their framework.

When in a tubular steel factory... work with tubular steel.

The first work I ever made was a chair, and I used tubular steel, weirdly enough. I titled it Chair [ i ] — I knew that I was going to be making more chairs. I produced a black version and a white version, and I stacked them so that the black version sits on top of the white version, as a kind of signifier of Black supremacy, or more as an internal promise to myself that I would not allow the white elitist class to dictate the trajectory of my goals. I made those chairs in 2016, and Matthew Williams was kind enough to have them photographed in his studio, which was on St. Mark’s Place at the time, when he had just started his brand, Alyx. He sent the images to Nick Knight, who posted them on his SHOWstudio blog. A couple of weeks later, I was asked to participate in my first exhibition [Clear Eyes at 95 Avenue B in New York, 2017]. Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn came to that exhibition around the time she was starting the design arm of Salon 94. That’s how I was brought into this world of collectible design. Everything started because I decided to make Chair [ i ]. Shortly after that, Salon 94 put together that big show, Midtown, at the Lever House building. Jeanne and Paul Johnson asked me to produce something and gave me carte blanche, so I decided to make this concrete bench that was dyed purple and sitting on wire rims — a Houston SLAB culture reference. The New York Times singled me out in the Sunday paper I guess because I was the youngest artist in the show. I was 23 years old, and my work was situated next to work by Vito Acconci, Gaetano Pesce, and Scott Burton. So the Times wrote this short article about the “jump-start” of a young artist’s career and ran it with this picture of me literally jumping over the bench, which was so embarrassing for me at the time. The photographer was like, “Would you just try jumping over the bench?” I was like, I really don’t want to. In my mind that’s like turning me into some sort of performer. But he was like, “Can we try just a few?” We took a bunch of great photos and they used the one where I’m jumping. I was so pissed, but looking back, it’s a pretty sick image.

Matthew Williams was working with Virgil Abloh at that time, right? I bring up Virgil because we are talking abut origin stories and support networks, and there was a moment in the late 2010s where everybody you spoke to who was starting a new brand or project would say that it was Virgil’s encouragement that inspired them to pursue their vision.

You know, I’m going to be honest. It wasn’t until he reached Louis Vuitton that I really understood where his head was at, and it hit me, like, holy shit, I have to really honor this man. I have to really pay my respects to this man for the new paths that he’s laying for young Black creatives. He bought an artwork from one of my earliest exhibitions. It was a rug with an emblem taken from the Nigerian flag back when Nigeria was basically a company owned by the British. It was an emblem that read “ARS JUS PAX,” Latin for “art, justice, peace,” which was the opposite of what was happening under British colonial rule. I took that emblem and inverted the colors and made a rug out of it. I later found out that Virgil placed that particular work in his home office in Chicago, which held some weight for me. What Virgil did for youth culture is unprecedented. The way that he opened up young people to even think about fashion and the arts will always be inspiring to me.

When you spoke to PIN–UP in 2018, you said you wanted to be a role model for young people. You were talking about the lack of Black role models in design and wanting to be a part of fixing that.

I don’t think that’s quite accurate anymore. I’d rather lead by example and just do things deliberately with my own conviction and morals. I think actively setting out to be a role model isn’t the healthiest way to think about things. I’m compelled to shed light on all the different ways in which Black people can become successful or financially liberated in our society as opposed to the select few options that we have been accustomed to believe are the only examples for people to look at and follow. Football, basketball, hip-hop — those aren’t the only swagged-out ways to escape intergenerational poverty. Arthur Jafa talks about dematerialized forms of production. Black people have a very difficult relationship with materiality because we were once considered material. That’s also why we excel in dematerialized spaces. That’s why we fucking kill in track and field.

I actually want to talk about movement. Your Knoll project is opening ahead of Salone del Mobile. “Mobile,” as in mobility, is used to refer to furniture in Italian, and most European languages. “Immobile,” as in immobility, means real estate — immovable structures. So there is something embedded in the definition of furniture that is about mobility.

That’s funny you mention that because the spoked car rim used in Chair [ i ] alludes to that idea. But then shortly after I made Chair [ xiv ] (Imobilidade M’aider), where I took an ambulance door I found at a local junkyard and basically cut it down. The word “AMBUL” is visible which I associate with the word “ambulant.”

Literally, “moving around.”

Yeah. If I’m trying my best to spark the interest of people that typically come from outside the art world to look into this predominantly white elitist space, why not use objects that everyone can understand? It’s almost a conceptual luring mechanism. I’m taking a somewhat recognizable functional object and embedding layers upon layers s of ideas that come from far outside its origins and everyday function.

Apparently Marcel Breuer’s first chair was called the African Chair. He made it at the Bauhaus in collaboration with Gunta Stölzl — the men did the woodworking and the women did the weaving. Apparently, this chair was significant in that it combined the two studios, and because you can see the hand of the makers, as opposed to having been made by a machine.

My first museum exhibition was at the Studio Museum [in Harlem], in their temporary space. I deliberately wanted one of the chairs I made for that exhibition to feel very African. I didn’t call it African Chair, but I kind of wanted to. I used black-dyed concrete and a brown-and-black rattan component of a lamp that I found at an antique shop. I titled it Chair [ xi ] (New Weave). You can see my hand in the concrete.

There is obviously a long tradition and a lot of writing about Modernists looking at non-Western objects and appropriating them. Apparently, in the 1920s, it would have been part of the curriculum to go to what were then called ethnographic museums and look at the objects looted from the colonies.

To be honest, I wasn’t aware of that. Chair [ viii ] (King Koko) came directly from that history you’re referring to. In researching West African material culture, I found one of the only surviving photographs of King Koko (1853–98) standing behind a chair that was almost certainly not made in an African tradition. It looked more like something that had been produced in Europe and then brought into the region. I recreated that chair as a way of acknowledging how foreign objects circulated through those colonial encounters, while shedding light on figures like King Koko who navigated and resisted that colonial pressure. So the work isn’t an appropriation of African forms, but rather a reflection on the complicated presence of European ones in that history.

Fast forward and you’re being photographed with the Beyeler Security chair, among other works, in Lagos, Portugal.

Yes. It’s the first port that the Portuguese sailed to West Africa from. That’s where Lagos gets its name. It was on that voyage in 1444 that they brought back to Europe the first enslaved Africans. There’s a museum called the Mercado de Escravos which translates to “Slave Market.” I thought it would be meaningful to have the piece photographed right outside the museum’s signage.

Are you good at having your picture taken?

I enjoy doing shoots, but not because I’m chasing visibility. It’s more that I feel how important it is for Black adolescents to see more people who look like them engaging heavily with materials, thinking about space, and taking ideas seriously. If my image being out there helps even a few of them imagine a new path for themselves, then I’m always happy to stand in front of a camera. I say that with the experience of knowing what seeing figures like Spike Lee, Pharrell Williams, and Jean-Michel Basquiat did for me.

I think young people have been listening? I first heard about you some time before 2018 from an intern of mine, an art student who was already following your work back then.

Last year I was invited to speak at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and what meant the most to me was learning that the students had specifically requested me to come. I was told the top two requests for that semester were me and Wolfgang Tillmans, which honestly caught me off guard. I don’t walk around thinking of myself in that way. But witnessing how students respond to my work makes me want to keep operating exactly as I have been, because clearly something in the way I move is interesting or helpful to young artists.

You’ve also talked about the artists you pay close attention to. In your interview with Jonathan Olivares, you mentioned Cameron Rowland.

In that interview I spoke about how much Cameron Rowland’s work has shaped the way I think about objects within systems. We crossed paths at the opening of the show Arthur Jafa curated at MoMA and were able to chat for a brief moment. He told me he enjoyed seeing my show at Galerie Francesca Pia, which meant a lot to me coming from him. Aesthetically, he’s the artist whose work I believe mine might resemble the most, among a few others. [The resemblance] definitely comes from a shared taste in the found readymade. At times I’ve even worried he might think I’m “biting.” In hip-hop culture biting is basically a crime — you have to be original, or at least that used to be the case. But hearing from him directly that he was into my work was a relief and a reminder that resemblance doesn’t automatically mean imitation. We’re both doing very different things.

That’s an art world thing, too, no? Or, at least, there is a certain type of artist — often appropriation artists, ironically — who is prone to calling out people for taking their ideas. Even in the internet era we can’t get on board with artists borrowing, let alone stealing.

I mean, people bite all the time now. But I think there’s a difference between taking and biting. When you’re biting, you’re trying to pass it off as your own idea, whereas when you take, it should be obvious — you should be very intentional about who and what you’re referencing. What I’ve always loved about artists like Kerry James Marshall is the clarity of intention. He once said something along the lines of, “What we see in the world shapes what we expect to see in the world.” And Kerry takes from white painters all the time. If you’re not seeing Black bodies when you stroll through a museum, then you won’t ever expect to see them there. His whole mission was to shift those expectations and insert Black presence into the museums in a very direct way. I’m not working with bodies, but I am trying to open up what it looks like when Black people can engage with materiality freely, without compromise, without limitation, and without being boxed into only working within dematerialized or conceptual forms. That freedom alone is its own kind of disruption.

Is that actually an argument for inhabiting “collectible design,” as you say, as opposed to going all in on art? For the tangible materiality of the objects, for the literal mobility in space, for the scale of distribution. Or is this about creating a cohesive whole, instead designing individual objects that live this atomized existence in custom colorways in people’s private homes, like you were doing back in Chelsea?

For me, it’s never really been about choosing a lane or discipline. I believe all the design work, the conceptual sculptures, the photos, and films can live inside the same ecosystem. When you’re thinking that way, art exhibitions become the most appropriate context to try and situate all of those ideas in proximity to and dialogue with one another. I love designing the shows themselves because that is where materiality and spatial thinking get to merge. Lately I have been thinking about architecture as the possible end goal for me, just as a way to explore all of these ideas about form, space, history, and emotion on a larger scale. To me, it’s the highest form of engagement with materiality.