Future Icons: Alexis & Ginger's furniture starts from found pictures

Research is at the heart of Alexis Tingey and Ginger Gordon’s design studio Alexis & Ginger. The two regularly spend hours browsing the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection — a small room brimming with brown folders holding over 150,000 images and photographs that librarians have been compiling since 1915 — to find visual references for their furniture and lighting. Among their recent finds? Brancusi sculptures, Baroque cathedrals, and ancient symbols, which are tacked up on the walls of their Sunset Park, Brooklyn, studio. 

'We are so inundated with imagery, but it's fed to us,' Gordon says. 'An important thing about the Picture Collection is randomness. It's not an algorithm showing us what we’re already seeing or what it thinks we would be interested in. There’s freedom to it.'

Alexis & Ginger: from eclectic inspirations to cherished objects

In a time when so much design is derivative, Alexis & Ginger’s work feels distinct — it’s slightly surreal, abstract, and elegant. This is because of their unique process. They work intuitively, guided by feeling and instinct versus a dogmatic sense of rules and best practices. When they start a project, Tingey and Gordon don’t know what they will be making, but they steadily collage together photographs, materials, and shapes until a piece emerges.

'A lot of our work comes from this moment of chance,' Gordon says. They prefer to sketch through physical models and even tweak pieces during fabrication, which they do themselves. Their debut collection Ode, which launched in 2023, includes a carved walnut side table with a fluted pedestal that resembles a flowing skirt and a columnar floor lamp enveloped in fluted fabric and edged with pearls. Photographs of flowing hair, Victorian lacework, and Medieval embroidery played a role in these pieces, as did wood offcuts lying around their studio.

Part of what makes Alexis & Ginger’s approach possible is that they share a deep kinship. They met as graduate students at the Rhode Island School of Design and just happened to be studio bench neighbours. They quickly became friends, bonding over mutual respect for each other’s designs and a shared interest in intricate crafts that are typically considered 'women’s work', like embroidery and quilting. While still in school, Tingey and Gordon started to receive attention from gallerists, editors, and curators. They were individually selected to exhibit in a survey of contemporary American design during Salone del Mobile 2022. 

After graduating in 2022, Tingey and Gordon decided to open a studio together, which was part of the inaugural residency at the Tribeca gallery Colony. This year, the online design magazine Sight Unseen invited the designers to contribute to its furniture collection. That collaboration led to the Tapestry chair, an India ink–stained oak piece whose silhouette riffs on a window and the natural drape of a pulled-back curtain.

As their studio grows, Alexis & Ginger want to scale up to installations and interiors. But their ultimate raison d’etre is to make cherished objects. 'We do everything we can so that when an object leaves our studio, the person living with it feels a beautiful connection to it,' Tingey says.

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