It would be a profound understatement to say that Dan Friedman was just redecorating. For over a decade, starting in about 1979, his New York apartment was a live-in art installation and idea laboratory in a near-constant state of metamorphosis. The decor was amped to the point it seemed like a trans-dimensional tear had bled into this reality. It was an ever-changing 15th-floor funhouse.
One view into Dan Friedman’s kitchen. Courtesy of Superhouse.
To a casual observer, Friedman’s light-hearted, Ragnarok of a design style could be lumped in with the offbeat Italian movement Memphis Group or part of the broader zeitgeist of totally maxed-out 1980s maximalism that swept the globe and encompassed everything from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse to Taco Bell and shopping mall interiors. This playful universe of squiggles, triangles, and pastels would usher in the digital age.
All of this was in the air, but Friedman was honing his own distinctive practice. He’d soon start making his own art furniture, or as he called it “domestic sculpture.” Rife with autobiography and savvy political commentary, the works emerged from Friedman’s experiments with found materials, his DIY-ethos hinting at the East Village arts scene where his bold vision coalesced. It wasn’t just club life that instilled a creative allure, but queer life. Friedman had briefly been married, and his lysergic, technicolor creations were a reflection of his new outlook.
A very different view into Dan Friedman’s kitchen. Courtesy of Superhouse.
The unifying theme throughout the iterations of the 5th Avenue one-bedroom, which was just north of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, was that it clashed with Friedman’s day job. He was a renowned graphic designer whose clients included Citibank. He oversaw the redesign of its logo and corporate identity.
“I was finding a degree of frustration in my own personal need to express myself in ways that I could not impose on these corporate clients,” Friedman recalled. “I would work all day and then I would come home and paint my walls. I would experiment with this rented environment, push the possibilities of what one could do. I found that I was doing this at a time simultaneously when I was seeing people doing graffiti in the streets. In principle, it was very much the same motivation—to find means of expressing myself on my walls.”
Friedman was speaking to the journalist John Gruen who was researching 1991’s Keith Haring: The Authorized Biography (Friedman was a friend and collaborator of the artist. All subsequent Friedman quotes are from this unpublished interview unless noted). Like Haring, Friedman also lost his life to AIDS.
An installation view of “Why Can’t I Have Fun All Day?” Photo: Matthew Gordon. Courtesy of Superhouse.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Friedman’s passing at age 49. The New York design gallery Superhouse has put together the exhibition “Why Shouldn’t I Have Fun All Day?” which runs through March 22. It’s proof that he wasn’t just of his time but ahead of it.
“Dan’s very early ideas are much different from the work that’s in the show,” said Superhouse founder and curator Stephen Markos. “He was bringing in materials from the street and wrapping them in old sheets and tarps and binding them with different ropes and using those forms as furniture. He experimented with textiles at first.”
Dan Friedman, Basic Screen (1981). Courtesy of Superhouse.
Friedman is known for his tables which could be wrapped in grass skirts or shaped like Sputnik or left transparent and filled with colored balls like those in the pits kids would leap into at Chuck E. Cheese. But his hallmark were his folding screens, which he referred to as “moveable walls.” They are like boisterous slashes of surreality slicing across a room. Two exquisite examples are in the show, including the first one he ever made in 1981 and Power Screen from 1984.
“It’s his masterpiece,” Markos said, “It’s outrageous and colorful, figurative in some ways, abstract in others. It’s rooted in the graffiti culture of the time but also uses corporate iconography. He’s referencing the Citibank logo that he designed, and a Hamburger Helper logo alludes to his middle-class suburban American upbringing. On the other side, these have transformed into more spiritual symbols referencing awakening, like this figurative eye.”
Markos added: “Sexuality doesn’t play a huge role in his work, but there are allusions to a gloryhole in this piece which I think is an interpretation of the sexual freedom of the ’70s and early ’80s in New York.”
Dan Friedman, Power Screen (1984). Courtesy of Superhouse.
Beginnings
When Friedman was 12 years old, his family moved to the Cleveland suburbs. “My parents, particularly my mother, were actively involved in the decisions about how the house would be laid out,” he would tell the design journal Eye. “I was fascinated by this process, the first inclinations I remember of being interested in design of any sort. In dreaming and playing, I became fascinated with architecture and would do drawings of fantasy houses, cars, all very futuristic, like The Jetsons. Along with their robotic maid and dog, the Jetson family had the most wild futuristic furniture and decor.”
Friedman did graduate studies at the prestigious European institutions the Ulm School of Design in Germany and the Schule für Gestaltung Basel in Switzerland. He then taught at Yale University for three years, followed by a stint at SUNY Purchase before embarking upon a commercial career and settling in the city. He was a pioneer of new typography in the U.S., redefining graphic design with bold asymmetry and mixed typefaces.
Dan Friedman. Polaroid Portrait of Dan, 1980s. Private collection. Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago.
He met the Hong Kong-born photographer Tseng Kwong Chi when he came to his day job at the Pentagram agency to show him his portfolio. Tseng would become an integral documentarian of the 1980s downtown arts scene, but he was also a wry social commentator and a conceptual artist. The pair became close friends, collaborators, and habitués at a raw and rowdy crucible for the downtown art scene on St. Marks Place, about a 15-minute walk east from Friedman’s apartment.
Club 57 was in a church basement. High concept, low budget, goofy, and epic, it was equal parts dive bar, cabaret, and gallery. Theme nights included Putt-Putt Reggae, New Wave Vaudeville, and Psychedelic Ping Pong. Hallucinogens weren’t hard to score. It proved a launch pad for Haring, who curated shows and installations, along with Kenny Scharf, Marilyn Minter, and offbeat performers like Klaus Nomi and John Sex, who helped shape its anything-goes spirit. It became a hangout for Jean-Michel Basquiat, Madonna, Fab 5 Freddy, and Debbie Harry. The actor and performance artist Ann Magnuson was a ringleader.
Ann Magnuson at Club 57. Photo: Robert Carrithers.
“Kwong Chi brought Dan to Club 57,” she recalled. “They were about 10 years older than most of us, but they didn’t seem like they were old. They just seemed slightly more mature, seasoned, and more organized. Both of them provided guidance in many different ways to us. We would all see each other at all the different clubs and gallery spaces. There was a lot going on all the time. Dan was a grownup and a mentor and very stabilizing.”
The Soho News was the alternative paper that covered the scene. “That time in New York was wild,” said Kim Hastreiter, who was its style editor and enmeshed with Club 57. “If you were creative, you were in the mix. Everyone was broke, everyone was making things, everyone was out every night. It was like an art school that never closed. Dan straddled two worlds—he had the Yale pedigree, the serious design training, but then he got pulled into the downtown madness and let himself get swept up in it. He went from designing Citibank logos to making furniture that looked like it belonged in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. It was a total reinvention—one minute he’s this buttoned-up guy, the next he’s doing these wild, neon pieces that everyone downtown was obsessed with.”
Tseng Kwong Chi, Gang’s All Here, New York (1983) © Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc. Standing, Katy K, Keith Haring, Carmel Johnson, John Sex, Bruno Schmidt, Samantha McEwen, Juan Duboise, Dan Friedman. Kneeling, Kenny Scharf, Tereza Scharf, Min Thometz/Sanchez and TKC.
Friedman was instantly recognizable in his vibrant, boldly patterned suits, most often paired with a hat. “Dan felt like a refined gentleman from another era that wasn’t that distant but was in contrast with the wild bohemia that existed in the East Village,” Magnuson said.
Friedman thrived as an insider/outsider in Club 57’s orbit. “It was a safe haven for these young people to come and experiment among each other,” he said. “In many ways, I was out of place. I was in my late thirties. I completely identified with them because I felt that they were beginning something very much like I was beginning something. The only difference was that I had been through quite a bit, a whole profession, in the meantime.”
Tseng had known Haring from the neighborhood. “In the spring of 1979, I met Kwong Chi,” Haring said in his biography. “He was standing on a street corner on First Avenue and Fifth Street, and he was wearing these really high white corduroy pants. He was so eccentric looking that I knew I had to meet this person. I ended up sort of cruising him, but then we became friends. He showed me his photographs, which, at the time, was a series of guys in stripper outfits called ‘Slut for Art.'” Friedman also forged a strong bond with Haring, who was still a student at School of Visual Arts. “Of course I was impressed. I was jealous of his easy prolificness,” Friedman recalled. “The things that I make are a result of deliberation and lots of pain. To see someone who could automatically produce marks with such apparent self-assuredness, was very provocative. The other thing that probably attracted me was simply Keith was just so likable.”
Keith Haring and Tseng Kwong Chi, Club 57 (1980). Photo: Harvey Wang.
Tseng started documenting Haring on his nocturnal missions into the subway system, a formative stage in the artist’s career where he developed his lexicon of radiant babies, UFOs, and barking dogs, rendered in chalk. Their differences were clear but usually complementary. “Kwong Chi loves to get on the phone and is an incredible gossip and Keith is not,” Friedman said. “It’s not his thing.” Tseng would document the entirety of Haring’s career, an invaluable and intimate archive.
“Dan had been in Europe and my brother went to art school in Paris,” said Tseng’s sister, Muna, a choreographer. “They had an international view. Keith had never been out of the country and was from rural Pennsylvania. But Dan and Kwong Chi knew that this boy Keith had ideas spouting out of him. It was very much like they recognized each other.” Haring would design scenic elements for her ballet in 1982.
Tseng and Friedman went on vacation to Puerto Rico with Haring and his boyfriend Juan Dubose—it was the first time either of them had been on a plane. “I was one of the first people who he would hang out with who was someone a bit older, with a great deal of experience within the world that he was entering,” Friedman recalled of Haring.
“What I think was an influence that I had was this notion that art can touch upon every aspect of the things that live around us,” Friedman said. “A sculpture doesn’t have to be a sculpture. A painting can be part of a wall. It doesn’t have to be an object on the wall. So, this mentality about seeing rooms as total environments conceptually, I think was an influencing thing. On the other hand, my palate intensified as a result of Club 57 and other kinds of experiences.”
Muna Tseng visited Friedman’s apartment. “It was a complete artwork in itself. It was like entering a colorful fantasy world,” she said. “Life and art were fluid for Dan, as well as his sense of play. He wasn’t a very gregarious person, but he had wit, and Kwong Chi captured that in photos. He did one portrait where Dan is wearing a scuba suit and flippers juxtaposed against his furniture.”
Tseng Kwong Chi, Tseng Kwong Chi and Dan Friedman, Met Museum, New York (1980). © Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc.
Friedman and Tseng collaborated on many projects. In Tseng’s decade-long “East Meets West” self-portrait series, he’d don a Mao suit and pose in front of landmarks (a wire connected to the hand-triggered shutter release button is visible in many of the images). The 1980 Met Costume Institute theme was “The Manchu Dragon: Costumes of the Ch’ing Dynasty.” Tseng couldn’t resist posing as a fashion reporter in his Mao suit. “Kwong Chi decided to ‘cover’ the gala,” Muna Tseng recalled. “Dan was his assistant. Kwong Chi set his camera in front of the grand staircase and he photographed himself ‘interviewing.’ What are you wearing and what does this evening mean to you and posing with people like Mr. Chow, William Buckley, Warhol, and Halston. It was an infiltration of downtown creatives into the uptown world. He and Dan did really fun projects like that, which are so subversive.”
Meanwhile, change was on the horizon at Club 57. “Andy Warhol was really tired at that point and he knew he was tired,” Hastreiter recalled. “Interview went through a Republican stage. Andy needed rejuvenation, so he sniffed out Keith. One night, Keith had his first art show in the Club 57 basement. He put all the art on the wall with thumbtacks. Everything was $100. Club 57 was always the same people every single night, no one ever came other than the family of people. There was Keith, Kenny, Tom Rubnitz, Joey Arias, me, this crew, right? In walks Tony Shafrazi with Andy Warhol. They were slumming. I’ll never forget it. We were all like, ‘Oh, fuck, this is gonna ruin everything.’” The dealer and Pop artist’s cameo changed Haring’s trajectory.
“Andy cozied up to Keith and charmed him,” Hastreiter continued. “I knew what was gonna happen. They’d bring Bianca Jagger, the whole club would be over. They were uptown, we were downtown. Within three months, Tony had this big gallery on Mercer Street. He gave Keith a giant show, like the biggest show in the world.” It propelled Haring into the art world stratosphere. Friedman designed the spiral-bound neon pink catalogue that is now a coveted collector’s item.
Dan Friedman designed the catalogue for Keith Haring’s 1982 exhibition at Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation
“My experience as a designer was how to package an identity, which we performed in putting this book together was very enlightening to him,” Friedman said. “It probably had some effect on how he, from there on proceeded to think about creating his own identity and of course documenting it as well.” The catalogue featured gallerist Jeffrey Deitch’s first essay.
“Dan was very close to Keith, so he was the best choice for designer,” Deitch said. “This book became a landmark. I was much younger, but it remains one of the best essays I’ve ever written on an artist. It sparked an ongoing creative collaboration with Dan. Most importantly, we did three books together: Cultural Geometry, Artificial Nature, and Post Human that were tremendously influential. I’d say it’s the most dynamic creative partnership of my career. Something I’m very grateful for.”
Club 57 faded away in 1983. In a way, it was a subversive and absurdist retort to Cold War anxieties and increasing Reagan-era tensions. But an existential threat was mounting. That August, one of its biggest stars, the new wave opera singer Klaus Nomi, died from a mysterious new illness.
But all the while, Friedman’s art world forays were gaining traction. His 1984 debut solo exhibition at Fun Gallery was titled “Mr. D Starts Fresh,” a nod to his remixed lifestyle and the uptown street art culture that was permeating the East Village. His brother Ken attended the opening. “I took my daughter when she was about nine years old,” he said. “Dan was great with kids. He said, ‘well, she needs to be dressed in proper attire.’ So, he took her to a shop in his neighborhood and bought her a leopard skin Day-Glo leotard. We went in a limousine.” Dan opted for a porkpie hat and a lavender and yellow striped suit. Friedman would go on to show with the Néotù Galerie Kreto and the lauded SoHo art furniture gallery Art et Industrie, where he showed a Day-Glo collection illuminated with black light.
An installation view of “Why Can’t I Have Fun All Day?” Photo: Matthew Gordon. Courtesy of Superhouse.
Friedman’s furniture wasn’t just about shirking the boundaries of Minimalism and traditional tastes. He used bold forms and humor to comment on power. His 1981 Three Mile Island Lamp, inspired by the partial nuclear meltdown, mimicked a glowing, unstable tower, a stark warning about technological failure and environmental risk. His tables shaped like countries, such as the Africa Table (1985) and USA Table, transformed geopolitical borders into everyday objects. By making landmasses into surfaces to be used and occupied, Friedman subtly critiqued national identity.
Friedman’s work rejected modernist neutrality and wielded cartoonish forms to signal distrust of institutions and consumerism. Often deliberately dysfunctional, his designs embraced postmodern irony, mirroring a world in flux and challenging the role of design in everyday life.
Fashioning Change
As Friedman scaled back his nightlife activities and remained deeply engaged in making art, he returned to graphic design. The French-born fashion executive Laurie Mallet met him when he was still in the corporate world. “He was technically amazing, the best graphic designer I ever met,” she said. “At Pentagram, he was a tyrant. I know of people that worked with him that he made cry every day because he was so demanding and difficult. Then he freed himself.” She went to his apartment for a meeting.
“The building was very bourgeois,” she recalled, “and then when you walked in it was like a punch in the face.”
Tseng Kwong Chi, Dan Friedman Floating in Seafood (1989) © Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc.
Mallet was the business partner of the trailblazing Black fashion designer Willi Smith. By 1985, WilliWear was generating approximately $25 million in annual sales. Art was a cornerstone of the brand—its distinctive SITE-designed showroom served as a performance hub and artist collaborations (decades before they were de rigueur) included Nam June Paik and Christo and Jeanne-Claude—the workers that installedThe Pont Neuf Wrapped in Paris were wearing WilliWear uniforms. In 1984, Williwear released a collaborative collection with Haring.
Hastreiter lived upstairs from Smith and styled some of the fashion shows. “Willie learned about art and collecting from Laurie,” she said. “He bought a Keith Haring and a Basquiat and they got to know Keith. Laurie was like an angel. She would always buy young artists’ work. She was generous and philanthropic and loved art.” Both became Friedman collectors as well.
Dan Friedman, Tornado Fetish (1985). Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Ken Friedman.
Friedman became a frequent WilliWear collaborator, working on disparate projects from T-shirt design, to the quirky refurbishment of Mallet’s office, to the interior of the brand’s Paris store. “He was very rigid,” Mallet recalled of working with Friedman. “He had learned all the rules. They were part of him, so he never completely forgot them. But he broke them in a very interesting way.” Friedman’s regimentation contrasted with Smith’s gregarious magnetism. “They were trying to establish a language,” Mallet said. “Willie had no rules. That’s what made it interesting. I was in the middle.”
Mallet doesn’t recall how her and Friedman’s relationship shifted. “He was my boyfriend,” she said. “How does one start dating? We started enjoying each other’s company and going out together. He was married and then he came to New York and he had a gay moment or was gay, I don’t know exactly that part.”
Cindy Crawford poses in the Dan Friedman-designed WilliWear store in Paris.
Mallet said the relationship lasted until his death. She is glad Friedman is gaining recognition, but understands why he doesn’t have the stature of some peers. “Dan was a bit of an introvert,” she said. “To be talented and to do things that you want to do are very different things than being famous. It’s two different projects and sometimes they meet and sometimes they don’t.”
The Last Form
In April 1987, Willi Smith died of AIDS. Activism was an integral part of Haring’s persona and practice. In August 1989, he revealed his status in Rolling Stone, a bold step in challenging stigma. “I certainly admire him a great deal for being so open,” Friedman said. “I’m just the opposite. I keep it very private, and almost nobody who knows me knows that I’m part of ‘the group’ as well. There are a handful of people who know.”
In February of 1990, Haring died at 31, followed three weeks later by Tseng Kwong Chi who was 39. Friedman helped Muna design the announcement for her brother’s memorial service at Paula Cooper Gallery.
An installation view of “Dan Friedman: Stay Radical.” Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago.
“A tsunami of deaths started in the late ’80s,” Magnuson said. “Keith. Kwong Chi, John Sex. It was too much. We watched people dying right and left. You saw the obituaries and even if you didn’t know them well, you were acquainted with them. And sometimes all you can do is just try to keep moving and not breakdown. There were so many memorials. I spoke at many of them and I’m just sobbing through ugly crying. Then my brother passed away and he was HIV positive. It was a war.”
“We went to Greece to work on a book,” Deitch said. “Dan was already HIV-positive but kept it to himself. He never, never shared it. He was very nervous about making this trip, but he never indicated any negativity. In retrospect, it’s amazing, his courage to continue.”
Dan Friedman. Post Human (1992), catalogue of Jeffrey Deitch curated traveling exhibition. Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Ken Friedman
Friedman’s profile rose in Europe and his work was produced by design studios in Paris and Milan. He resumed teaching again, this time at Cooper Union. In 1994, he published Radical Modernism, a retrospective of his work and treatise of his design theories and life philosophy. Alison Fisher curated the 2023 Friedman exhibition “Stay Radical” at the Art Institute of Chicago.
“He knows that he’s sick,” she said. “All of his best friends have died. Instead of retreating, he reengages. He writes this incredible book that is really geared towards students, trying to encourage them to see the good in the world and to keep trying and having an ethical role in the world.”
“He went very fast,” Deitch said, “really unexpected.”
One of Friedman’s final furniture series included retrofuturistic tables that resembled spaceships. “At the end, he does this space series, which is an interesting way that his career resolves,” Fisher said. “These pieces about space are so beautiful because they’re tied to his childhood. He loved space themes as a kid, but also he’s thinking about new frontiers, thinking beyond earthly values.”
Dan Friedman, Space Lab (1988). Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago.
But there are also subtle works that, rather than evoking deep space, explore a different kind of void—the almost imperceptible shifts between elements. “He was distilling a lot of the ideas he had been working with during the ’80s into a quite practical and streamlined way,” Markos said. “These curly forms that allude to the sinuous curve that’s found in a lot of his work. It’s using all the same geometry, but it’s elevated and elegant and streamlined. And the forms are much more practical as furniture.” Dan Friedman was looking beyond, but he was also gracefully tying up loose ends.
Special thanks to The Estate of John Gruen, Keith Haring Foundation, and Estate of Tseng Kwong Chi.
_-_Gassed_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)
