In a New Exhibition, Dan Friedman’s Radical Spirit Comes Into Focus

Naturally, Friedman quit his day job and transformed his apartment, a Fifth Avenue high-rise overlooking Washington Square Park, into an eccentric creative laboratory. As his peers were sharing their work on New York’s subway stations, sidewalks, and walls, Friedman delighted in bringing the city inside. He began accumulating everyday detritus—crumpled beer cans, old children’s toys, mangled bicycle wheels—from the street, salvaging them into whimsical assemblages and discordant furniture replete with bold colors and cultural references. Every surface became a canvas for his pent-up experimental ideas around shape, volume, and color, challenging conventional notions of “good design.” An ironing board was repurposed into a chair; tattered rubber gloves hung on bright, Day-Glo painted walls like sculpture. 

By using his apartment to caricature the modern home, Friedman plumbed new possibilities for what a beautiful living space could look like. “His home was an extraordinarily important part of his practice,” says Stephen Markos, founder of Tribeca gallery Superhouse, which is recreating key moments from Friedman’s residence for its latest exhibition, titled “Why Shouldn’t I Have Fun All Day?” Markos, a lover of radical design who previously included Friedman in a crucial show about the functional art movement’s profound influence on collectible design, was originally drawn to his genre-bending work for its deeply progressive spirit. His pastiche of bold colors and irreverent graphics reflected the chaotic media-saturated landscape of ‘80s-era Lower Manhattan and yielded unforgettable pieces that still make salient points today.  

The works on view, many of which have never been shown publicly, toy with the wastefulness of American consumerism, offering prescient insight into climate change and environmental destruction. Among those are USA Table (1986), a fiberboard table shaped like the contiguous United States teetering on what appear to be upside-down oil towers; blood-red paint drips across its otherwise slick metal surface. Trash strewn across New York City comes together vividly in A Fallen Sky in a Regal Landscape (1985), a neon-hued assemblage that once held pride of place in Friedman’s apartment. His love of pastiche captivates in Basic Screen (1981) and Power Screen (1984), two elaborate folding screens spray-painted with colors and patterns evoking a graffiti-covered Manhattan. Friedman would go on to create numerous examples of distinct folding screens on casters—or “movable walls,” as he called them—to channel changing interests, moods, and seasons. 

Perhaps the most resonant piece isn’t an artwork at all. Rather, it’s a video tour of Friedman’s storied apartment shot by his friend and colleague Christopher Pullman, a longtime professor of graphic design at Yale. The rare footage offers a brief glimpse inside the living museum of a restless visionary whose fabulously fun and forward-thinking spirit continues to resonate three decades after his death, of AIDS-related complications, in 1995. “I have used my home to push modernist principles of structure and coherency to their wildest extremes,” Friedman wrote in Radical Modernism (Yale University Press), a provocative treatise that advocates for designers to embrace the richness of their surroundings and work with passion, humor, and responsibility for the sake of the profession. “I create elegant mutations, radiating with intense color and complexity in a world that has deconstructed into a goofy ritualistic playground for daily life.” Put simply, his work is a celebration of progress, optimism, and fantasy.

“Dan Friedman: Why Shouldn’t I Have Fun All Day?” will be on view at Superhouse (120 Walker St, 6R, New York, NY 10013) until March 22.