Our guest is Jonathan Nesci, a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, furniture, and fine art. He grew up in Oak Lawn, spent eleven years in Columbus, Indiana, and now works out of a studio on his brother's farm about an hour outside Chicago, in collaboration with a guild of high-craft makers throughout the Midwest.
In this episode, Jonathan speaks with host Christian Solorzano about an origin story that begins in a sandbox — his grandfather owned a concrete block company in Des Plaines, had fresh sand delivered every summer, and made him a chest of hand-sanded wooden blocks. Jonathan traces that state of play forward through a fundamentalist Baptist school, a thirty-foot BMX ramp in his driveway, and five years driving a forklift at FedEx, where a coworker named Brian asked whether he knew that people design furniture for a living.
Jonathan describes cold-emailing Richard Wright, breaking a thirty-thousand-dollar Gio Ponti desk in his first two months at the auction house, and discovering that the job was never about repairing things himself. It was about finding the upholsterer, the glass guy, the welder. That model became his entire practice, and he makes a case for it in an essay he calls Craft Surrogates: producing a thing doesn't make it any less yours.
The conversation turns to systems and constraint. Jonathan describes himself as a formalist — form drives everything, while scale, material and finish stay open. He talks about designing around what local fabricators can already do, about the golden ratio as a framework that scales endlessly in both directions, and about the H1 coffee table he built in 2006 after being rejected from a juried competition, simply to find out whether he could.
He also tells the story behind 100 Variations, the hundred mirror-polished aluminum tables he installed in the sunken courtyard of Eliel Saarinen's First Christian Church in Columbus — including the moment a local architect told him, mid-pitch, that the courtyard had once been a reflecting pool, and the week in which three organizations funded the whole project. It became the pilot for Exhibit Columbus.
Along the way, Jonathan speaks about faith and hope on his own terms, about what meditation clarified for him in 2017, about why he now sells almost entirely to the trade, and about why, six years into a sculpture practice, he feels like a kid again.
