About

Stephen Burks Man Made is a hands-on collaborative design studio deeply invested in the transformative power of craft techniques that challenge the limits of new technologies within industrial production.

We believe in a pluralistic vision of design that is inclusive of all cultural perspectives and backgrounds.

We bring the hand to industry through a community-driven, workshop-based practice.

Our projects include furniture, lighting, interiors, exhibitions, and product design.

We are Stephen Burks (Principal), Malika Leiper (Cultural Director), Vara Yang (Design Consultant), and Fridolin Jeger (Design Assistant).

Our solo exhibition Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place, formerly at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (September 16, 2022 - March 5, 2023) is part acclaimed mid-career survey and part commissioned speculative project presenting the last decade of professional practice alongside new expressions of radical domesticity through handcrafted industrial design.

Most recently, Stephen Burks: Spirit Houses opened at Volume Gallery in Chicago and Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place (November 19. 2023 - April 16, 2024) opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where Stephen became the first African American to receive the Collab Design Excellence Award.

Stephen Burks

Chicago native, Stephen Burks is an industrial designer, product development consultant, and educator whose innovative approach to design synthesizes craft, community, and industry. Independently and through association with various non-profits, he has collaborated with artisans and craftspeople in over ten countries on six continents. His socially engaged practice seeks to broaden the limits of design consciousness by challenging who benefits from and participates in contemporary design.

Stephen and his studio, Stephen Burks Man Made, have been commissioned by many of the world’s leading design-driven brands to develop collections that engage hand production as a strategy for innovation to express a more pluralistic vision of design including BD Barcelona, Cappellini, Dedon, MASS Design Group, Missoni, & Roche Bobois.

He has had solo exhibitions and led curatorial projects at the Studio Museum in Harlem (Stephen Burks Man Made, 2011), the Museum of Art & Design (Stephen Burks, Are You a Hybrid, 2011), and the High Museum of Art (Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place, 2022).

He has been visiting faculty and a strategic consultant to academic institutions around the globe and taught architecture and design at Berea College, Columbia University GSAPP, ECAL, the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture & Design, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Stephen is the only African-American to win the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Product Design and the only industrial designer to be awarded the prestigious Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Malika Leiper

Originally from Cambodia, Malika Leiper is interested in the culture of design across various disciplines with a particular focus on emergent contexts in Southeast Asia.

After completing her master’s in urban planning at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, she consulted with restaurants, non-profits, local governments, and museums on research and strategies to build creative cultural capacity, often through public programming and community engagement.

She approaches design as a collaborative process of translating knowledge and insights from different worlds into one common language through technical, moral and utopian applications.

Most recently, Malika has contributed to Disegno Journal #34 as a Het Nieuwe Instituut inaugural emerging writing fellow with her first published short story, When The Words Don't Exist.

Vara Yang

Vara Yang joined Stephen Burks Man Made as an industrial designer in New York in 2017.

Before working at Stephen Burks Man Made, she worked with several startups helping them bring their products and services to the market, including smart home devices, smartwatches, smart jewelry, and 3D printers.

Now an independent consultant based in Rotterdam, she continues to work with the studio on projects at various scales from furniture design to packaging to exhibitions.

Vara received her bachelor’s in design engineering from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan and her master’s in Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design.

news

Welcome to Contemporaries

Disegno Journal

February 15, 2021

With the romanticism of a wiser woman looking back on a fleeting youth, Joan Didion once described New York City as the “shining and perishable dream itself”. In her 1968 essay ‘Goodbye To All That’, Didion retraces the beginning and end of her relationship with the city that never sleeps – an eight-year affair that transpired with the “deceptive ease of a film dissolve”.

Stephen Burks and Malika Leiper outside of Contemporaries, Dumbo (image: Dean Kaufman).

Beginnings and endings have been at the forefront of our minds lately as we reflect upon our newly-formed relationships to this city and to each other. After a long hot summer that oscillated from lockdown to protest, on 15 October 2020, Stephen Burks and I opened the doors to Contemporaries in the Brooklyn waterfront neighbourhood of Dumbo. Neither a gallery, nor a storefront, nor a studio, Contemporaries is a hybrid – a storefront studio project that uses creative methods to explore what it means to be of and in our time.

We stumbled upon 192 Water Street on an afternoon bike ride in late January 2020. A 100-year-old tea warehouse – where Contemporaries now occupies the ground-floor commercial space – the building was converted into expansive lofts in 2012. The three-bedroom penthouse is currently listed at nearly $5m.

During the industrial boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when New York City produced more than 50 per cent of the US’s total manufacturing output, the neighbourhood of Dumbo was home to a host of paint, steel wool, and coffee companies. The industrialist Robert Gair, inventor of the corrugated cardboard box, once owned such vast holdings in the area that it was referred to in the 1880s as “Gairville”. Today, however, Dumbo is one of the most expensive property markets in New York City, with its highest concentration of resident billionaires.

This twist in the fate of the waterfront industrial zone was sealed in the 1980s, when David Walentas, a property developer and founder of Two Trees Real Estate Development Firm, is alleged to have first heard the word “Dumbo” at a party. A catchy acronym for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass”, the neighbourhood was at that time a desolate area of derelict warehouses and factories, overgrown vacant lots, and pioneering artists in search of high ceilings and light. One of those artists was Steve West, the owner of Stephen and my favourite neighbourhood dive bar, whom we met on Contemporaries’ opening night. Steve moved here in 1989, working odd jobs including one at the MoMA where he was an art handler for the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He, along with other creatives such as the experimental filmmaker Matt Bass and collagist and painter David Auzenne, came to Dumbo to take advantage of the space and cheap cost of living. What they didn’t realise, however, was how the cultural production they were responsible for would later be appropriated by speculative real estate and development forces. By the early 90s, Two Trees had purchased around 2.5m sqft of Dumbo for $12m.

StephenBurksManMade

The Sacred and Profound

By Vasia Rigou for The Chicago Reader

September 19, 2023

The Volume Gallery exhibition connects past, present, and future through reverent design.

The Making of the Community Basket

By Stephen Burks for the Oak issue of Material Intelligence online, edited by Glenn Adamson.

June 2, 2022

Yes, the mighty oak tree, the stuff of legends, is also the traditional
basket maker’s wood of choice in Appalachia, as elsewhere
in the eastern United States.

On New Cosmologies: Stephen Burks Approaches the Sacred

Najha Zigbi-Johnson for Volume Gallery

September 8, 2023

Within this spiritual and cultural context, I engage and understand the most recent work of industrial designer Stephen Burks, who has created a collection of modern altars entitled Spirit Houses.

BD Barcelona 50th Features Grasso

Perez Projects Presents BD Barcelona: A New Perspective, 50 Years of Design

April 16, 2023

How Stephen Burks “Future-Proofs” Craft

Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place Book Review in Untapped Journal by Francesca Perry

February 13, 2023

The book Shelter in Place considers the possibilities, and the precedents, of the designer’s inclusive approach to creating objects for the home.

Taking a Moment to Lounge at Milan Design Week

The New York Times by Lauren Messman

April 15, 2024

You can always see where you would like to sit at the annual festival of furnishings and household objects.

Home as Project

Stephen Burks for Goodee

September 1, 2019

"I found myself back in school in the midst of a year-long fellowship, where I met Malika."

Dedon Launches Kida Dining Chair

Milan Furniture Fair

April 17, 2023

New Kida dining chair to be presented during 2023 Milan furniture fair

When The Words Don't Exist

By Malika Leiper for Disegno #34 x Het Nieuwe Instituut Design Drafts #1

September 21, 2022

How to begin writing about design if the word does not even exist?

The Crafting Diversity Initiative

Berea College Student Craft

September 26, 2019

Today, Student Craft is no longer just a factory of student labor, as it had been for nearly 100 years, but is transforming into an academic program producing open-ended products.

Curbed 21 Questions

By Diana Budds for New York Magazine

November 7, 2023

Stephen Burks Wants to Finish a 20-Year-Old Conversation With Fran Lebowitz.

Welcome to Contemporaries

Disegno Journal

February 15, 2021

With the romanticism of a wiser woman looking back on a fleeting youth, Joan Didion once described New York City as the “shining and perishable dream itself”.

Business of Home Podcast

By Dennis Scully & Fred Nicolaus for Business of Home

January 23, 2023

Stephen Burks wants to open the doors of the design industry.

A Casa Di Burks

Living Corriere Della Sera No. 4
Creative Survival Tactics: At Home with Malika Leiper & Stephen Burks by Olivia Fincato

April 6, 2023

"We transformed a former bakery into a modernist gallery."