Works In Progress III

Exhibition documentation, San Francisco January 2025

Curated by Kate Greenberg and Kelley Perumbeti

We were eating mussels with a glass of wine when the power of the bench dawned on us. Sitting in a cafe in Potrero Hill, we had been exploring what the next iteration of Works In Progress might be. The fact that both of us arrived at this wonderment in the same moment meant something. The public bench is embedded with physical layers of time and weather, and with poetry of all the moments spent. Most of us sit on them regularly, yet we don’t often look at them through the hands that made them. We thought to ourselves: how great would it be if the benches in our landscape were highly particular to the craftsperson’s perspective, offering an arena for surprise, creativity, and novelty?

Nearly a year after the first Works In Progress— where we studied the panorama of contemporary design in the Bay Area, searching far and wide for its essence—we now find ourselves zooming in, asking designers to search inward for their reflections on a singular piece of furniture as a way to bring us together.

—Kate & Kelley