Howard Meister

A fourth-generation furniture maker, Meister joined Art et Industrie in 1980, remaining with the gallery until it closed in 1997. He was one of five core members who, during the 1980s and 1990s, reinvigorated the artist-designed furniture genre in the United States. Meister liked to “design backwards” stating “I decided what it was going to look like first. Then I decided what materials it should be constructed in. The important thing to me was how it looked, the poetry of it.” His furniture has been featured editorially in more than a hundred publications internationally and was selected for the redesign of the executive offices of Rolling Stone magazine in New York. The seminal 1987 film Wall Street, by Oliver Stone, also used his pieces as set decoration. In 1990, Meister was a recipient of Metropolitan Home magazine’s Design 100 Award. Meister’s pieces are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Art and Design, the Brooklyn Museum, the Queens Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Howard lives and works in Massachusetts.