Nora Blog

Sarah Rose Sharp is a woman of many talents, and a 2015 Kresge fellow. She loves breakfast and artists so much she blogs about both. When asked who is impacting culture in Detroit in a positive way, she’ll tell you that, like your Facebook semi-official relationship, it’s complicated. She is a self-taught quilter whose first quilt celebrated the seasonal rhythms of life in Detroit. The quilts and leather tree ring placemats she has made for Nora are for “people who cherish living with art and embracing functionality and beauty” in their day-to-day lives. She loves the Shipherd Greens Community Garden...

Sometimes artists experiment with new materials and things get weird. Other times, artists do weird things and experiments end up smelling like French fries. One of Thing Thing’s first experiments involved deep frying recycled plastic in vegetable oil to its melting point and molding it to cardstock models. It worked, and the result became a prototype for the rotationally molded plastic pillow lamp they created for Nora’s Culture Lab collaboration. The collective chose their name by creating a big funny list with a short list of rules: no pretentious acronyms, and they could not use the word atelier. Their friend...

Andy Malone’s name means Wolf Boy, so you know he’s not playing around. He still manages to be charming and affable, so don’t let the name fool you. When he was ten years old, Andy built a pinewood derby car, and while he didn’t truly learn how to work with wood until after college, he recalls loving the feeling of shaping the wood into a new form. For Nora’s pop-up, he has made one of a kind mutoscopes, or kinetic animation mechanisms. They are like sophisticated and beautiful flip book televisions that will be irresistible to animation lovers and nostalgic...

Looking for a little light in your life? Patrick Ethen of ROYA Design has lovely lamps that will cast a floral geometric shadow on your heart. These cardboard beauties are designed to be flat-packed for easy shipping and assembly. Cardboard is a ubiquitous material, and Patrick believes that it’s actually so useful that people have lost the ability to appreciate it objectively. Think about how sturdy cardboard is, and the way it catches light so nicely. While he tried other materials to design these polyhedra lamps, he came back to reliable cardboard. He loves the Dequindre Cut and believes that...

When Clover and Mars get out of bed in the morning, they eat quinoa, blackberries, yogurt and hazelnuts while dreaming about being on Belle Isle. They make products for those among us who love to host dinner parties and afternoon teas. For the Nora’s Culture Lab pop-up they have created a lovely entertaining set, a table runner with napkins . They first used these kinds of materials when making tea towels that were organic, functional, absorbent, and left no streak behind. They can get behind anything that is rustic and modern simultaneously. Their name, Clover and Mars comes from their...