By Jorge S. Arango
Michael Aram has all you need for the perfect alfresco setting.
Designer Michael Aram has an archive of around 35,000 designs, which will soon include a line of soft goods.
When Michael Aram was living in New York and starting to exhibit his artwork in 1989—he had moved back to his hometown from Maine with a group of fellow Bates College art students—he went to a sprawling exhibition of the artist Alexander Calder at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. “Calder liberated me. He was designing everything: sculptures, rugs for his house, toys for his kids, tableware, jewelry,” says Aram. “I had always questioned the hierarchy of art versus craft. For me it was simply about seeing and making.” Aram has been seeing and making ever since.
Today his prolific eponymous business dwarfs the output of his American artistic idol. Aram’s archives contain between 30,000 and 40,000 designs, though at any given time there are about 3,000 in circulation. He has expanded his offerings from the metal home accessories that earned him early notice to porcelain designs produced in Portugal, and glassware executed in Eastern Europe. A line of Michael Aram soft goods (made in Italy)—throws, duvet covers, sheets, pillows—arrives this fall. “The sad thing about our company,” he quips, “is that it’s run by a creative, so we just keep making things.”
That banner year of 1989 was pivotal in another way. Soon after that landmark Calder show, Aram departed for India, where he encountered a wealth of crafts produced in Delhi. “I was having fun discovering the city,” he recalls. “As I’d go from one alley to another, I was just touched by what the artisans there were making.” He created some drawings and observed the craftsmen executing them, learning along the way what was possible, which techniques lent themselves to which sorts of objects, and also falling in love with metal in the process.
“I had always questioned the hierarchy of art versus craft. For me it was simply about seeing and making.”
As an artist, he says, “Metal had seemed less accessible as a material. But there is something so noble about metal. You can cast a thumbprint or a gesture and it’s captured for eternity. I went from paper and canvas to metal.” Aram began spending many months at a time in Delhi, devoting more and more time developing designs for everything from tableware and serving pieces to frames and flatware, initially wholesaling them to stores through reps.
Before long, Neiman Marcus published one of his serving sets on the cover of its catalog, and Aram’s company took off. But in one sense, he had really just come full circle. His father had been a vice president at the famed Danish modern metalsmith company Georg Jensen (“I remember crawling under the display tables,” says Aram), then later worked for Barneys New York. Though Aram pursued a degree in art history and fine art studio practice, not unlike Jensen, his creativity sprung primarily from nature. “My work has always been about creation,” he says passionately, “this concept of why we are here, trying to understand our purpose. Nature was a way I made sense of it—cycles of life, death and decay, then regeneration. When you connect something organic in nature with an organic process, the designs really explode. It amplifies nature.”
Common motifs include branches, leaves (particularly ginkgo leaves, which adorn some of his most popular products), pomegranates, cherry blossoms, and butterflies. It takes great skill to create an Aram piece. For instance, he explains, he is recognized for adorning the rims of bowls with delicate metal beads. “Each of those beads—like a drop of rain, misshapen and perfectly imperfect—is individually placed. If it’s too hot, it just runs down the sides. If it’s too cold, it won’t attach.”
Today there are Michael Aram stores in Los Angeles, New York, and at Bal Harbour Shops, and Aram is officially a resident of Florida, though he spends plenty of time in his native New York for business. His husband, Aret Tikiryan, is executive vice president of the company, and their adolescent children Anabel and Thadeus have started dabbling in the business.
Anabel and Michael work together on some jewelry designs, while Thadeus, explains Aram as he picks up an object from his desk and holds it up, has designed (among numerous other items) a skiing Santa Christmas ornament. True to his father’s nature-inspired designs, in Thadeus’s creation, Santa’s poles are branches and his skis are wooden planks. It seems safe to say that another generation will continue to be involved in a family business that started some 35 years ago.
Meanwhile, Aram has also made another sort of full circle. He has returned to large-scale sculptures. Some of these limited-edition pieces—a nearly eight-foot depiction of the Daphne myth, an even taller stylized clump of grass in Corten steel—are available through his website. But Aram has also been commissioned for work, including a large sculpture for Pope Francis, and a 13-foot sculpture installed at the St. Vartan Cathedral commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.
“Creatively speaking, people like to pigeonhole you,” Aram says. Where this artist is concerned, however, just you try!
