New York, alexpwhite.com
A long-time right-hand man to New York interior designer Kelly Behun, White planted his own stake in 2015, launching a mesmerizing solo furniture collection influenced by neo-Futurism and retro nightclubs.

What is American design to you, and what excites you about it?
For me American design is about context, i.e. community, production, and location — the very literal and obvious “how, where, and when” something is made. When the maker/producer/consumer cycle is focused on local economies, communities get stronger, regional aesthetics develop, lots of sharing and collaboration occur and the creative scene becomes really fertile (and tends to have an impact on a much larger scale.) I find this process exciting and positive. I’ve lived in times/places where this was a music scene or an art scene and right now furniture/interior design seems to be having a similar type of productivity. In other words…Sisters Are Doin’ it For Themselves!

What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?
Under the Alex P White label, I’m in the planning stages of two projects: an all-ages Playscape and a collection of mood lighting. Playshroom 3.0 is a modular environment akin to something like upholstered scaffolding, and for my next collection, I’m using LED and neon light to transform sconces into objets d’art (or as I like to think of them, paintings with their own light source.) I plan to show iterations of both projects during New York Design Week in May. In my work with Kelly Behun, I’m super excited about one of our most recent interiors projects. Our client is the chicest: an international collector with exquisite taste and a flair for the bizarre. With Kelly’s keen eye and her passion for the current design scene, the results are truly special; the home is as unconventional as it is traditional. And with this project, having the opportunity to work with such talents as Lindsey Adelman, Apparatus, Cody Hoyt, The Haas Brothers, Misha Kahn, and Thaddeus Wolfe — just to name a few — is one of the best parts of my job. Thanks y’all!

What inspires your work in general?
ON HEAVY ROTATION
• The Cure | Staring at the Sea The Singles 1979 -1985
• Eurythmics | Be Yourself Tonight
• China Crisis | Flaunt the Imperfection
• Active Child | You Are All I See
• Warpaint | Warpaint

BOOK STACK
• I’ll Never Write My Memoirs | Grace Jones (2015)
• The Ghost in the Machine | Arthur Koestler (1967)
• The Lighting Book | Deyan Sudjic (1985)
• XenoGenesis | Octavia Butler (1987)
• Pierre Cardin Evolution | Benjamin Loyaute (2006)
• Bloomingdale’s Book of Home Decorating | Barbara D’Arcy (1973)
• The Theater of the Bauhaus | O. Schlemmer, L. Moholy-Nagy, F Molnar (1961)
• GLOSS | The Work of Chris von Wangenheim (2015)
• Tony Duquette | Wendy Goodman & Hutton Wilkinson (2007)

“Fantasy is not the opposite of reality; it’s what reality forecloses, and, as a result, it defines the limits of reality, constituting it as its constitutive outside. The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and won’t be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it’s embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.” — Judith Butler