David Haskell’s private studio practice steps into public view at Donzella Ltd.
For more than a decade, David Haskell has spent his weekdays running New York Magazine and his evenings and weekends shaping clay in a Brooklyn Navy Yard studio. Now, that parallel life has become the subject of Boom Beach, his first solo exhibition, on view at Donzella Ltd. inside the New York Design Center at 200 Lexington Avenue through June 30.
The exhibition gathers 68 works made over several years, most of them ceramics, alongside a smaller group of bronzes and glass sculptures. Haskell’s forms begin on the wheel, then are cut, stretched, stacked, punctured, or folded into shapes that feel weathered rather than polished. They hover between vessel and landscape, with surfaces that suggest erosion, pressure, and time.
Haskell returned to ceramics as an adult in 2013, after working with clay as a teenager. What began with planters for unusual desert plants gradually expanded into sculpture, and he has kept the practice going twice a week at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The schedule is modest by art-world standards, but Haskell sees a kind of discipline in that limitation. He has said he wishes he had more time in the studio, even as he values the clarity that comes from making work without needing it to support him financially.
That independence shapes the exhibition’s tone. The prices reportedly range from under $2,000 to around $15,000, placing the work in the orbit of collectible design as much as contemporary sculpture. Yet Haskell resists framing the project as a branding exercise. Instead, the show reads as the public result of a long-running, private commitment.
His references are telling. Haskell points to Isamu Noguchi, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore, artists whose work moved fluidly between utility, abstraction, and monumentality. He also describes editing and sculpture in similar terms, saying both depend on rhythm, structure, and the careful return of an idea at the right moment. In the studio, that logic appears in the way a simple thrown form can be reworked into something more complex without losing its balance.
Boom Beach takes its title from a stretch of coastline on an island in Maine, a detail that gives the exhibition a quiet geographic anchor. For Haskell, the show makes visible what had long remained separate from his public role: a sustained sculptural practice that has developed alongside one of the most visible editorial jobs in American media.
