For anyone like us who “grew up,” professionally speaking, in the New York design world in the last few decades, it was always with a sense of awarenessof and deference to the scene’s elder statesmen. Constantin and Laurene Boym, for example, set up Boym Partners back in 1986, and by the time we started circulating in 2005, they still felt markedly omnipresent, both critically and physically speaking. We suppose that’s why it felt so surprising when these New York stalwarts up and left town in 2010, after Constantin accepted a two-year tenure as director of graduate design studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. They disappeared from New York design events, parties, exhibitions, and talks, only occasionally sending dispatches to their mailing list about life on the other side of the globe.
They returned to New York a year ago, but we hadn’t really heard from them until now — with the launch of Constantin’s new exhibition at Brooklyn’s UrbanGlass, “Learning From the East,” which opens this Saturday. There, he’ll exhibit a series of gorgeous Pyrex incense burners he created based on the ones he discovered and collected throughout his time in the Middle East, merging his New York practice with the ideas he brought back from his time abroad. We recently had the pleasure of interviewing Constantin about the project, from his discovery of the incense burners to whether his future work will continue to bear a Middle Eastern imprint. Read on below.
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