This story is part of our annual look at the state of American design. This year, we’re highlighting work that shines through an acrimonious moment—and makes the case for optimism.

Although it might not always get the flowers it deserves, North Carolina is one of America’s great hubs of design. There’s the ongoing legacy of the Black Mountain College, of course, where everyone from Walter Gropius to Buckminster Fuller helped generations of students push the midcentury avant-garde. More recently, a pair of triads—the Research Triangle, composed of universities around Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, and the more commercial trio of Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and High Point, home to the namesake semiannual fair—are fueling growth in tech and business sectors. And, to a degree, design.

Craftsperson and designer Mike Newins moved to the state in his mid-20s, and in both his personal practice and his fabrication studio, Make Nice, he finds inspiration in everything from Light and Space art to cyberpunk to local forests. Much new work happening around him is rooted in craft, he says. At the Pocosin Arts school, the Penland School of Craft, and in their own studios, designers make playful work with traditional methods: “furniture that is often unserious but made by someone with blindingly high skills.”

But these designers and artisans have also had a difficult time getting support from the institutions driving the regions’ economies. For example, Generator at Congdon Yards, a space that gives designers access to industrial-grade woodworking tools, is, in Newins’s estimation, a half-hearted attempt to lure talent to High Point. “I think High Point [Market] is willing to play with us but hasn’t quite figured out what the playground is.” Nevertheless, “the craft community is happily building a positive and experimental culture,” Newins adds. “I hope to see this trickle into the market.”

Mike Newins’s picks

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