Painting the Town

Last year, Herman Miller’s philanthropic division, the Herman Miller Foundation, underwent a major overhaul. Headed up by a volunteer group of employees, the annual giving strategy was re-envisioned as Herman Miller Cares, which is based in five areas of focus: Education, Health, Essential Human Needs, Environment, and Design, Art and Culture. Ryan Anderson, Herman Miller’s Director of Future Technology, heads up the latter, and explains its objectives simply: “to encourage creative place-making and to take art out of the confines of the gallery. Instead of asking someone to pay to see the art,” Anderson says, “we’re saying, we’ll find you.”

By focusing efforts on cities in which Herman Miller has a high volume of employees, Herman Miller Cares is able to encourage company-wide participation, and moving forward hopes to focus on serving local youth programs. The location for the new Latin American Headquarters, Herman Miller’s Mexico City showroom, situated at the juncture of Mexico City’s Condesa and Roma neighborhoods, provided an obvious draw and provided the team an opportunity to hone in on a burgeoning arts and culture scene and join forces with a local, yet globally active public arts organization, All City Canvas. For the site of their site-specific intervention, ACC commissioned LA-based artist Augustine Kofie to create a mural on the exterior wall of Impact Hub Mexico City’s brand new coworking space, located right in the heart of Roma. Kofie was briefed to create a composition that reflects the space and character of Impact Hub while responding directly to the context of the neighborhood at large.

What do you think attracted All City Canvas to your work?

Ricardo and Gonzalo approached me because Herman Miller [produces] American, modern furniture, and my work does dip into the modern realm. I am obsessed with shape and form and organization, and I also love ’60s, ’70s modern design—both American and European—and I love linear shapes and forms. I’m inspired by paper architects like Lebbeus Wood and Syd Mead. The work that I do is like an amalgam of all the things I’ve ever loved, and I’m at a point where I can think of something and produce it. The last nine years I’ve been working in a hard-edge linear kind of form, an abstraction of the graffiti lettering that I learned and trained myself with, but I’ve also taken on and expanded and stretched it and brought in lighter tones, and that has appealed to folks that appreciate street art and the traditions of graffiti but also modern aesthetics.

Could you tell us how you landed on the theme/design for this piece?

ACC had sent me photos, but I really didn’t get [the] full idea until I walked into Impact HUB after all the furniture was installed and all the texture and coloring was set. When you’re looking at the wall as a civilian on the street, that’s only one aspect, but the intent of the piece is for Impact Hub as well—to see it from the street but also from the roof. Those two perspectives are different from the ground perspective. I know my colors and know which eye level I need to be at in order to accommodate a couple different viewpoints, so I established the colors, which are partially inspired by the colors of the space, as well as what I do normally—walking around [Roma] and getting the feeling of its slight colonial, vintage history but also the modern aspect happening. There are younger people coming in and there’s that collision between the two—it’s a beautiful collision.