Joey Grimm and Jordan Johnson’s Made in Americana is also a gathering place for KC transplants.
Artist-entrepreneurs are an essential part of Kansas City’s cultural and commercial landscape. They are also a leading export.
Take Made in Americana, a design firm started by Kansas City Art Institute alums, Joey Grimm and Jordan Johnson, who create and market custom furniture and lighting from their studio in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.
The two have been showing together and collaborating for the better part of a decade; in fall 2013 they launched Made in Americana, drawing on their combined skills in woodworking, sculpture and metalworking.
“It was a combination of past experience and circumstance,” Johnson said. “We started getting hired to build things for people. For us the process of making and creating together is what’s exciting, whether it’s a performance, a sculpture, a stool or a bar. If something works for you in New York, you have to take it.”
Grimm adds, “We moved up here to pursue our ambitions and one thing led to another. The shop aspect wound up taking off.”
They started out doing fabrication jobs for private residences and businesses, building furniture designed by other designers. Projects included a red oak bar, made from a tree that fell during Hurricane Sandy, for the Budin coffeehouse in Brooklyn.
In late August, Grimm and Johnson held a “shop party” to celebrate the debut of their own design line, which includes shelving, stools and little wood pipes, all made in accordance with a philosophy that stresses “simple, clean, colorful, and purposeful form.”
They also introduced the Jacobs Lamp, created from a glass jar coated inside with pigmented marine-grade resin. The idea was to evoke “the lights of the urban evening: neon glow, amber streetlights, florescent storefronts, and lightning bugs caught in jars.”
The lamp was designed in collaboration with KCAI alum Matt Jacobs, part of a growing contingent of KC transplants gathered around Made in Americana, including artists Paul Smith, David Rhoads and Amanda Martinez and poet and writer Henry Eddins.
Eddins recently signed as the firm’s director of development. One of his first contributions was an essay for Made in Americana’s web site, in which he compares good design to a good meal: “the ingredients, the preparation, the cooking, the presentation, the final forkful — blooms together.”
“A real smart-to-the-hand, smart-to-the-eye object has this same unity,” Eddins adds.
Grimm and Johnson sell their designs from the studio and through their online store, www.madeinamericana.nyc. Most of the items are priced at less than $500, and $30 buys a Glow-In-The-Dark 5-panel hat embroidered with the company’s logo.
“Our future plan,” Jordan said, “is to keep developing our own products, expanding into more apparel as well as art-based sculptural objects, shelving and lighting—touching every part of a room.”
