Seeing

I have had three great love affairs in my creative life: skateboarding, graffiti and industrial design. I started skateboarding when I was twelve, graffiti at sixteen, and industrial design at nineteen. I saw them as unrelated activities or disparate visual cultures, and I – somewhat myopically – felt that to be truly devoted to one, I had to set aside the others. Recently I have started to reconcile my past interests, seeing the connections between them, and how they have all informed my aesthetic values. Jonathan Olivares

Jonathan Olivares was born in Boston in 1981 and graduated from Pratt Institute. In 2006 he established his practice, which is based in Los Angeles and works in the fields of industrial, spatial and communication design. His designs engage a legacy of form and technology, and ask to be used rather than observed. His clients include Vitra, Knoll Moros and Kvadrat. Olivares’ work has been published internationally, granted several design awards — including Italy’s Compasso d’Oro – and is included in the permanent design collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Art Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Vitra Design Museum.