Three questions with Kate Greenberg

Kate Greenberg is a San Francisco-based designer and curator. She makes furniture and community, and with Kelley Perumbeti produces the Works In Progress exhibition series founded on principles of community, interaction, mutual support, and dialog through form-making. Works in Progress I, which was on view in January 2024 at the American Industrial Center in Dogpatch, featured furniture pieces from 13 active Bay Area design studios. Works in Progress II held in October 2024 at 198 Utah Street near CCA’s campus featured 14 design studios and artists, paired to collaborate on seven screens, as well as individual works from those studios. Both exhibits featured CCA alums and professors. In January 2025, the CCA Furniture Program will team up with Kate and Kelley to produce Works in Progress III at the CCA Campus Gallery, held in conjunction with the FOG Design + Art Fair, January 23-26, 2025.

The Works in Progress II opening felt like a real community event, including students, faculty, the featured artists, their families, and the local design, art, and architecture community. Can you talk about what community means for you and Kelley?

I had a real blueprint for community coming out of CCA, specifically the bench room community. I was really lucky the years I attended, there happened to be such a strong group of deeply wonderful humans and great work. We had a lot of fun and were there for each other, for technical problems or glue-ups but also personally. I saw how that could exist in both work and personal ways: a more holistic thing than just coming in, doing your job, and leaving. After CCA I was lucky to land in a shop called Alameda Point Studios that has a really sweet community; however, especially after Covid, I felt like people really couldn’t come together as much with growing families or a different workplace-life balance. Around that time of lockdown, Kelley had moved back to San Francisco from New York. We both knew there were amazing things happening, but it felt more spread out and insular to mini-communities; we both wanted more from the local conversation of design and craft, and even if for our own sake of joy in community.

How did you come to work with Kelley?

I am such a fan of her interior design and architecture studio, Office of Tangible Space. When I heard they had a San Francisco office and not just an office in New York, I cold-emailed her. We met and instantly clicked. We shared similar morals and sentiments on what it means to be in this field and desires to make a genuine, positive impact. A few weeks later, I pitched doing an exhibition series together, and low and behold she had her dreams and plans brewing in the background. So for both of us it was the right timing. We did the first Works in Progress with another CCA alum—Sahra Jajarmikhayat (MFA Design 2023). It was a trifecta between our three perspectives and skill sets.

The word curation is a little tricky. We didn’t want to drop into a gallery and have an infrastructure or expectations. It’s more of a homegrown effort and continuing conversation, less of a hierarchy. We build almost everything ourselves, just as the artists are building their pieces for the show, and try to cultivate a family of photographers, graphic designers—anyone that can help with setup or production, all people who share the same values and are also artists in their own right. The feeling is we’re doing everything together as peers, sometimes the word curation doesn’t quite fit the description.

Can you talk about the thread and divergences of the series?

There’s a consistent narrative around furniture: furniture that is perhaps a little unlikely and has a strong vision of that studio’s worldview and practice. Not just nice, handcrafted, functional goods, but something with a backstory. I think that is a core part of CCA, too. It was always, “Why did you do this? There has to be a reason for you to be doing this.” So there's that sort of bind amongst all the works. We also included two studios for Works in Progress II that were in the first show as a kind of continuation. After all, this is an ongoing relationship and effort that we're all building together. In the last two exhibitions, we had a dinner in the exhibition space just for the artists. We all sit together and talk for hours. When do you get to do that? We’re all busy people, but this feels so important.

In the second exhibit we wanted to build more community, not just from artists outward to the Bay Area audience, but also within the group of artists and designers, to create moments to connect with and build off each other. So that motivated the pairing and collaboration structure. Serendipitously, Kelley and I had both been thinking about screens. At CCA I had gone to Japan with David Asari’s class and I did my final project on screens and how they can playfully dictate how to move through space and frame your entire world, interior and exterior. As an interior designer, Kelley is thinking about screens all the time. We both felt it was an open-ended prompt and a stage for this new working relationship with a collaborator, not overly burdened with structure, allowing people to flex and experiment with materials and each other’s practices.

We were very nervous because we were asking studios who didn’t know each other to spend a lot of time together, and to have this whole process done in three months. But they were all excited. There was a momentum—at first we saw a lot of nervousness and felt so much responsibility, but then the challenge led to joy and we could see how it shifted their lives in a positive, or at least impactful, way. For Works in Progress III, as we plan it and work with CCA right now, the idea is to continue fostering the culture of furniture design and crafted objects within this city, to keep on with a community I always hoped for when I graduated, and continue to push creatively into the future together.

—Interviewed by Saraleah Fordyce, Faculty in Critical Studies and MFA Design