The Hottest Hoosier Design

Stars Align

Jonathan Nesci and Christopher Stuart both have furniture designs in the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s permanent collection—and they’re working right here in the museum’s backyard. From their studios—Nesci’s in Columbus and Stuart’s in Carmel—comes deceptively simple sculptural furniture that’s sold through art galleries for tens of thousands of dollars. Nesci became established in Chicago as a designer who pushes the boundaries of digital fabrication in collaboration with master craftsmen, while Stuart is a native eastsider who can weld and learned to design on the job at Thomson Consumer Electronics; he later graduated from Herron School of Art & Design, and can keep a lot of fabrication in-house. When Nesci moved to Indiana, he and Stuart discovered a mutual ambition and mindset. “We both work in collectible design, which is a relatively small field,” Stuart says. And hard to understand, so we asked each guy to explain the other’s genius.

Nesci on Stuart

“What makes Chris’s work of interest is that he has a background in pure