A number of artists today are directly engaging with contemporary design, and Jim Isermann has long been at the forefront of these concerns. Since receiving his M.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts in 1980, Isermann's work has traced the conflation of postwar industrial design and fine art in popular culture through wall-hangings, hand-woven rugs, fabric-covered sculptural cubes and vinyl patterned murals. Isermann has never been ashamed to embrace the possibility of utopia in all its aesthetic and functional forms, and indeed his works are as likely to make reference to stained glass, patchwork quilts and latch-hook shag rugs as they are to minimalist sculpture and hard-edged painting.

Yet within these celebrations of pop-kitsch handicraft is an underlying pathos that recognizes that nothing, no matter how well-crafted, innovative, or beautiful it may be, can ever truly transcend time. In the postwar era, Op Art, hard-edged color field painting and minimalism once reigned as the art of the moment, but today we view those movements in historical terms, the cultural products of a specific age. Nevertheless, Isermann's work upholds the possibility of beauty inherent in all eras of forward-thinking utilitarian design.