At a Dan Friedman exhibition, the bizarre joy of being Dan Friedman
In a Chinatown gallery’s vibrant Dan Friedman retrospective, Dan Friedman contemplates the work of Dan Friedman
From Left: Dan Friedman, Dan Friedman Courtesy of Dan Friedman
By Dan Friedman February 26, 2025
Reviewing a show by a namesake is a bizarre experience. It’s like arriving in an alternate reality where signs everywhere remind you that you made objects you have never seen before.
When I started writing for the Forward 20 years ago, people confused me with a bunch of other Dan Friedmans, including the published novelist, the reporter, a right-wing correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. Very few people thought I was the visionary designer Dan Friedman since he had already been dead for a decade — but he was one of the more fascinating of the group. Indeed, with a European education, a Yale affiliation, and a love for New York City, he and I had more in common than the bald head on the cover of his book Radical Modernism.
That latter Dan Friedman’s new exhibition, “Why Shouldn’t I Have Fun All Day,” currently on display at Superhouse, shows the late designer’s playful, boundary-pushing approach to art. Set up in two apartment-sized rooms, cheery colorful furniture and decorations hint at the social politics of the turn of the millennium. More than just a retrospective, the show is a celebration of Friedman’s radical vision — one that rejected the rigid structures of corporate culture in favor of a modernist aesthetic that is expressive, syncretic, and deeply idiosyncratic.
Friedman’s ur-Design moment came in in the late ‘50s when he was about 12 and his family moved into their “dream home” in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1994 he told Eye Magazine that he “was exposed to the process of watching this dream home taking shape. My parents, particularly my mother, were actively involved in the decisions about how the house would be laid out, the colors and the decor. I was fascinated by this process, the first inclinations I remember of being interested in design of any sort.”
“Fun All Day” returns to that origin by exhibiting many pieces that Friedman had in his own home. The venue is itself appropriately idiosyncratic, located on the barely labeled sixth floor of an anonymous building in Chinatown. Although the exhibition is a fixed display for its 6-week duration, over that period stasis would be unusual for Friedman in his apartment which he would constantly repaint, rearrange, and redecorate. Fittingly, his most iconic pieces are screens that divide up a room, but also transform the space with color, lights, and — on one of the two on display — spinning objects. The manifesto he laid out for modernist design is progressive, personal and humanist.
After Friedman returned to the United States in 1969 from his graduate training as a graphic designer in Germany and Switzerland, he taught at Yale before working in corporate design through the mid to late ‘70s. Later he taught at Yale alongside other teacher practitioners like Paul Rand (who designed iconic logos for IBM, UPS, and Enron among others), but he ended up rejecting the corporate design world in favor of the art world, becoming what the Art Institute of Chicago called one of “experimental design figures of his generation, working across assemblage art, installations, print media, and avant-garde furniture.”
He famously said that modernist design had sold out its own ideals — “Modernism forfeited its claim to a moral authority when designers sold it away as corporate style.” His approach to this new world of design embraced the rigor of those modernist principles properly applied — as he saw it — along with the messy, joyful chaos of postmodernism.
Instead of working for a soulless corporate world during the day and having fun designing with the New York scene in the evening (he was a friend of Keith Haring and worked with him, too), he quit his job and became a full time professional radical modernist designer. Intent on bringing art, humanity, warmth, color and fun from the nighttime to the day, he worked toward putting design and technology at the service of the entire population, though not in the drab post-war mode of uniform mass production.
In an essay in Radical Modernism, eminent curator Jeffrey Deitch notes that the “Friedmanized version of the contemporary world” is a huge non-hierarchical interplay of the postmodern made available for the individual human. It mixes “artificial and natural,” art from museums and streets, electronic and analog, “European, American, Asian, and African.” There is no room for festering nostalgia in Friedman’s world or ignorant anger in his aesthetic. He embraces the “deviant and unacceptable” because it is “exactly in eccentricity and unpredictability that new creative choices may reside.” His vision encounters no “other” that he does not embrace – though he gives short shrift to late capitalism’s stultifying constraining and hoarding of ideas, design, and capital.
Evident throughout “Fun All Day” is the tension between the playfulness that comes from treating individual differences with respect and the structure necessary for good design. But, even this tension is a rebuke to the desire for certainty in the 90s corporate world or the bigoted assumptions of today’s caudillismo.
The exhibition showcases a range of Friedman’s work, from furniture and sculptures to graphic designs that exude his signature blend of bold geometry, bright colors, and hand-drawn elements. His pieces defy easy categorization, existing somewhere between functional objects and fine art, between Bauhaus discipline and New Wave irreverence.
One of the key ideas Friedman championed was that design should not be limited to commercial or functional ends — it should be a means of personal and artistic expression. This philosophy is at the heart of “Fun All Day” — whether a decorated chair with a distinctly handmade quality or a typographic explosion of color — invites us to reconsider our relationship with everyday objects and to question why seriousness is so often privileged over playfulness in the design world.
Friedman died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1995, but his ideas continue to resonate, making “Fun All Day” more than a retrospective. I feel his work invites us to embrace creativity, and refuse to conform to recently-codified yet solemnly-enforced social expectations. It serves as a reminder that, as Friedman himself argued, life should be experimental, not just maximizing efficiency as a cog in the corporate machine. Everyone is different — heck, even every Dan Friedman is different — and design should reflect life in being inclusive, embracing joy, and, yes, having fun all day.
“Why Shouldn’t I Have Fun All Day” by Dan Friedman is on view through March 22 at Superhouse, 120 Walker Street 6r, New York, NY.
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