Best of NYCxDESIGN 2026. X-Deck by Slash Objects – Courtesy of Arielle Assouline-Lichten.
Design. From 14 to 20 May, NYCxDESIGN 2026 returns to animate the five boroughs with hundreds of events spanning exhibitions, keynotes, installations, neighbourhood tours, and public activations. The festival draws together global creatives, leading brands, cultural institutions, and curious members of the public into a citywide programme. This year’s edition feels particularly rich, so we’ve pulled together seventeen exhibitions worth working into your itinerary.
- RELATED STORIES: Read more about NYCxDESIGN 2026 on Archipanic.
ICFF + WANTED
May 17–19 at the Javits Center – 429 11th Ave, NY 10001.
ICFF at Javits Center, NYC – Jenna Bascom Photography.
The International Contemporary Furniture Fair returns with an expanded roster of American and international exhibitors. The Healthy Materials Lab gathers practitioners the crossroads of human health and climate-positive design; the INTERNI Magazine Lounge, backed by Italian names such as Artemide, Calligaris, Molteni & C, and Porro, provides a natural gathering point for the trade crowd. The Rarify installation, in partnership with Tecta and the Bauhaus Archiv Berlin, brings museum-quality archival drawings, prints, and artefacts rarely seen outside Europe.
Works by Anna Dawson at Look Book, Wanted – Photo by the designer.
Alongside ICFF, WANTED continues to champion North American talent through its Look Book, while the Launch Pad and Schools Showcase spotlight emerging international voices and student work. One logistical note: from 2027, the fair relocates to November, easing the pressure of a congested late-spring global design calendar.
Afternoon Light
May 17-19 at WSA – 161 Water Street, NY 10038.
Speaker Collection by Symbol x USM debuts at Afternoon Light – Photo by Symbol.
Welcoming both trade professionals and the general public, Afternoon Light settles once again into Lower Manhattan with a tightly curated line-up of over eighty brands, independent studios, and emerging makers. Several compelling debuts and collaborations punctuate this edition: Symbol and USM unveil a new audio collection; Australian electrical hardware brand Zetr and Flack Studio arrive with an interactive presentation; Sam Klemick joins forces with RAD Furniture on a new joint project; and Rarify pairs with lighting innovator Gantri to introduce a modular lighting concept.
SHINE
May 14-20 at The Seaport – 20 Fulton Street, NY 10038.
Table lamp by Bruno Grizzo at SHINE.
Running for the full duration of NYCxDESIGN 2026, SHINE occupies The Seaport under the curatorial eye of industrial designer Harry Allen, assembling original lighting works by seventy designers that collectively span craft traditions, emerging technologies, and deeply personal styles. Bruno Grizzo presents a table lamp encircled by enamelled feathers that tremble and drift at the slightest movement of air, while Benjamin Gillespie‘s Warp floor lamp derives its quietly unsettling form from scientific depictions of gravitational distortion in space-time.
The Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley
Until August 16 at MAD, 2 Columbus Circle, NY 10019.
The Haas Brothers, Uncanny Valley exhibition at NYC’s Museum of Art and Design – Courtesy of MAD.
This wildly imaginative exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design plunges visitors into the exuberant parallel worlds of twin artists Nikolai and Simon Haas. Organised by Cranbrook Art Museum, the show assembles fantastical hybrid creatures, algorithmically generated landscapes, and meticulously hand-built ceramics — a body of work that makes a compelling argument for craft’s continued vitality when it engages fearlessly with contemporary technology. Quirky, tactile, and consistently surprising, one of the most playful showcases of NYCxDESIGN 2026.
Joris Laarman x Friedman Benda
Until June 26 at Friedman Benda – 515 W 26th St, 1st Floor, New York, NY 10001.
Photo by Izzy Leung, courtesy of Friedman Benda and Joris Laarman Lab.
At Friedman Benda gallery, Dutch designer Joris Laarman presents new collections built entirely around ecological responsibility. The Ply Loop series — comprising a shelf, a console, and a seat — pushes plywood into genuinely new aesthetic territory through an innovative biodegradable resin that enables complex geometries without recourse to toxic compounds. The Symbio benches, meanwhile, are 3D-printed in a pioneering carbon-storing concrete, their recessed channels seeded with bio-active substrate to encourage the gradual colonisation of mosses and lichens.
Sarah Sherman Samuel at Colony
May 14-20 at Colony – 196 West Broadway, NY 10013.
Courtesy of Colony.
Colony devotes its NYCxDESIGN 2026 programme to a solo presentation by Sarah Sherman Samuel, one of the most closely followed names in North American design, showing her Weight and Wonder collection in tandem with the release of her debut monograph. The book maps the intersections of Samuel’s practice across interiors, furniture, and art. The exhibited objects provide a tactile, immediate counterpart to the printed page — ideas given physical form.
Night Stand: What We Bring To Bed
May 14-20 at CITIZEN M HOTEL – 189 Bowery, NY 10002.
Bumki Song – Courtesy of American Design Club.
citizenM New York Bowery joins forces with Brooklyn-based indie platform American Design Club for an exhibition dedicated to one of the most intimate corners of domestic life: the bedside table. One Night Stand: What We Bring to Bed unpacks the objects, rituals, and quiet personal identities that accumulate in the space between wakefulness and sleep. Highlights include a felt catch-all, a deliberately tilted table, and Korean craft objects. A surprisingly poetic selection of things we choose to keep close at night.
My Astral Mission
May 14-22 at 224 Centre Street, 4th floor, NY 10013.
X-Deck by Slash Objects – Courtesy of Arielle Assouline-Lichten.
Within the generous, high-ceilinged volumes of a SoHo loft, Slash Objects presents an immersive installation built around the debut of the X Deck — an architectural listening piece conceived by designer and architect Arielle Assouline-Lichten. Working with mirror-polished metals and carefully orchestrated cinematic light, the console investigates the relationship between physical space and the concentrated act of listening, turning the gallery into a vessel tuned equally to sound and illumination.
The New York Edit
May 15-20 at Design Hotel – 11 Howard Street, NY 10013.
Courtesy of Design Hotels.
Conceived by Design Hotels in collaboration with luxury online retailer Lumens and brought together by the curatorial eye of Simple Flair, The New York Edit assembles a considered group of independent city-based studios working across furniture and objects, with lighting as its organising thread. Light in New York, as the curators note, is never a neutral quantity — it simultaneously defines and distorts, at once cinematic and raw, artificial and deeply atmospheric.
ReMuji by Muji
From May 14 at Muji store, 475 5th Avenue, NY. 10017.
Photo by Muji.
Thirty fabric fish banners, each fashioned entirely from reclaimed clothing gathered through Muji‘s ReMUJI initiative, will be suspended at the brand’s Fifth Avenue flagship. The works emerge from a collaboration between Japanese textile designer Reiko Sudo and French exhibition designer Adrien Gardère, who together coax discarded materials into free-form objects of unexpected grace. The installation serves as the US debut of ReMUJI, a recycling programme that sits naturally within Muji’s broader philosophy.
Body Language
May 19-June 27 at Mociun showroom – 683 Driggs Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211.
Pieces by Bower Studios, Ian Collings, Nassi Lamps, Robin Francis Williams and Chen Chen & Kai Williams. Photo by Matthew Gordon.
Bower Studios presents a group show exploring gesture, movement, and form across mediums. Bringing together sixteen artists and designers — among them Alexis & Ginger, Chen Chen & Kai Williams, Chris Wolston, and more — the show considers how objects can reflect these subtle cues we attune to and embody. It is, in the best sense, a show about bodies in space and the quiet eloquence of things made in response to them.
OUI Design! Festival
May 14-20 at Villa Albertine – Payne Whitney Mansion, 972 Fifth Avenue, NY 10075.
Nautile by Lily Alcaraz et Lea Berlier- © Mario Simon Lafleur with the support of Adagp.
OUI Design! Festival returns to NYCxDESIGN 2026 to celebrate French design and craftsmanship in all its range and ambition. The centrepiece exhibition unfolds within the historic Villa Albertine, its scenography shaped by Harry Nuriev of Crosby Studios. Works by Design & Craft Residency laureates — many of them showing in the US for the first time — take centre stage. Highlights include Sophia Taillet‘s spinning mirrors [Read more] and Lily Alcaraz and Lea Berlier‘s Nautilus piece, woven in dyed wood.
Alien by Paraphenalia
May 13-19 at 144 Vanderbilt Avenue – Brooklyn, NY 11205.
Photo by Jack DeMarzo.
Few words carry quite as much weight right now as ALIEN — legal designation, political weapon, design provocation. Co-curated by Eliza Axelson-Chidsey and Jess Fügler, this third edition of Paraphernalia invites designers to respond to that single charged term across furniture, sculpture, and decorative objects. Gregory Buntain of Fort Standard, Adeye Jean-Baptiste, Colin Knight, and Kazuki Guzmán are among those taking up the challenge.
Office of Tangible Space at 144 Vanderbilt Avenue
May 13-19 at 144 Vanderbilt Avenue – Brooklyn, NY 11205.
Photo by Office of Tangible Space.
Housed within a Tadao Ando–designed building in Brooklyn, Nothing Comes from Nothing is a cross-generational exhibition presented by Office of Tangible Space alongside furniture platform VERSO. Pairing works by leading contemporary designers with historic, museum-quality pieces, the show proves that genuine innovation is always shaped by precedent, process, and lived experience. Separately, the studio presents The Espasso Apartment, an immersive residential interior furnished with pieces from Brazilian gallery Espasso, available by appointment.
Roberto Lugo’s Alfarero del Barrio
May 20 to December 6 at Madison Square Park – NY 10010.
Roberto Lugo in his studio – Portrait by Paolo Jay Agbay.
Roberto Lugo‘s Alfarero del Barrio installation Park take the form of a monumental vase-shaped sculpture installed in Madison Square Park through December. Covered in vivid painted motifs and figures, the work celebrates Puerto Rican culture while reflecting both the struggles and triumphs of a resilient and creative community. Lugo’s practice has long drawn on the traditions of ceramics to tell stories of identity and belonging. The installation brings that sensibility into one of Manhattan’s most democratic public spaces. In Madison Square Park, Lugo also creates a giant fire hydrant, hand-painted domino tables, and tyre planters filled with native Puerto Rican plants.
Bankston and FOR SCALE: A Manifesto on Touch
May 14-17 at Colbo – 51a Orchard Street, NY 10002.
Bankston’s Super Collection by Sans-Arc – Photo by Bankston.
Australian hardware brand Bankston joins forces with FOR SCALE on a thoughtful, sensory exhibition that repositions architectural hardware as an experience rather than a mere specification. The show presents collaborative collections by Sans-Arc, Edition Office, Civilian, and YSG Studio, anchored by a simple but resonant premise: that touch is not a passive aesthetic response but an active form of information. It is how the body language of décor speaks.
Ana Kraš at Emma Scully Gallery
Until June 13 at Emma Scully Gallery – 16 E 79th St #2, NY 10075.
SVILA, Ana Kraš at Emma Scully Gallery – Courtesy of the gallery.
Rounding off our selection for NYCxDESIGN 2026, Ana Kraš‘s SVILA at Emma Scully Gallery is a quietly beautiful body of work built around a single material: silk — or svila, as it is known in Kraš’s native Serbian. The Belgrade-born artist and designer presents new functional and sculptural objects that explore the fabric’s behaviour across varying conditions, attending closely to its translucency, its responsiveness to shifts in light, and the almost animate quality of its surface.
Warp Floor Lamp by Benjamin Gillespie at SHINE – Courtesy of NYCxDesign 2026.
