Jonathan Adler Comes Full Circle at the Museum of Arts and Design

Shortly after a teenaged Jonathan Adler discovered pottery at summer camp, he remembers racing to the mailbox to devour the latest copy of Ceramics Monthly. “A normal kid probably wanted Sports Illustrated,” jokes the ever-inventive ceramicist, furniture designer, and entrepreneur, who was raised in Bridgeton, New Jersey, but often escaped to New York City on the weekends to “haunt the halls” of the American Craft Museum, now known as the Museum of Arts and Design. The institution holds personal significance for another reason. “When I started making pottery 30 years ago,” he tells Galerie, “the first pot I ever sold was at the gift shop.”

In a full-circle moment befitting a Hollywood script, the Museum of Arts and Design has opened what Adler describes as a “half-curation, half-retrospective” look at his illustrious career. Fittingly titled “The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler” and slated to be on view for nearly a year, the wide-ranging show pairs the designer’s often witty, always wonderful creations alongside pieces by more than 60 craft artists that Adler hand-picked from the museum’s permanent collection including Betty Woodman, Howard Kottler, David Gilhooly, and Magdalena Abakanowicz. Each object—some of which haven’t been shown publicly for decades—carries a close connection to his creative journey. “You can see a direct through-line,” Adler recalls. “When you see pieces I love from MAD juxtaposed with my work, it suddenly makes sense of my entire life.”

The show unfolds in thematic vignettes curated by Simon Doonan, the legendary window dresser and former creative director of Barneys New York who also happens to be Adler’s husband. “I learned that we work very well together,” Adler quips about his spouse, who worked under Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in the 1980s. Massing objects in striking tableaux based on Adler’s offbeat fascinations, the scenography creates worlds unto themselves and carries unconventional names: “Authentica” celebrates the sleek forms of midcentury ceramics, “Funkiana” and “Kottler-ia” dives into craft’s power to satirize, and “Animalia” brings to life a menagerie of Adler’s signature nature-inspired forms.

One of the show’s most evocative moments arrives through a replica of the Jonathan Adler pottery studio that he opened nearly three years ago, a stone’s throw from the location of the craftsman’s first-ever studio in SoHo. Perhaps it’s a symbol of perseverance: though a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design bluntly told Adler that he had no talent, he persisted. He briefly worked odd jobs—the mail room of a talent agency, assisting a movie producer—before quitting to return to the wheel. In 1993, Barneys picked up his pots, and he opened his first store in SoHo five years later. Today, Adler’s eponymous brand enjoys more than 1,500 distribution points spanning furniture, lighting, home accessories, decorative objects, tabletop collections, bedding, bath accessories, candles, rugs, pillows, and more. He also tackles large-scale projects like exuberant interiors for the Parker Palm Springs.

Despite his impressive career achievements, Adler insists his “big bang” of understanding his identity happened when he first started making pots. Exhibiting his career highlights at the Museum of Arts and Design—the place where one gift shop purchase started it all—is already one of his biggest milestones. “I started all this without any plan, just one foot in front of the other,” he says. “It has been an amazing opportunity to understand what the hell I’ve been doing for the past 30 years. I’ve had the most enjoyable and unexpected odyssey from doing the most primitive thing—a guy, mud, fire, water, and a wheel—to disseminating all my ideas from that period in so many different materials. I really won the lottery.”

“The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler” will be on view at the Museum of Arts and Design (2 Columbus Circle, New York) until April 19, 2026.