Stephen Burks

Chicago native, Stephen Burks is an industrial designer and artist, whose innovative approach to making synthesizes craft, community, and industry. 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 making. 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). In the fall of 2023, Stephen Burks: Spirit Houses opened at Volume Gallery in Chicago and Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place (Nov 18 - April 14, 2024) traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art where Stephen, already the first and only African American to win the National Design Award in product design, became the first African American to receive the Collab Design Excellence Award. Most recently, Stephen’s studio, Stephen Burks Man Made, was invited to represent the United States as members of the curatorial design team of the 2025 U.S. Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. Their curatorial project, Objects of Belonging, will give form to the American porch as a site of creativity and resistance.

The Wedge Lecture