At Hudson Wilder, we believe design is never just about objects — it’s about people, perspective, and the everyday rituals that shape how we live. That belief has guided Soft–Power, our ongoing platform for cultural dialogue, artistic exchange, and creative diplomacy.
Borrowing from political theorist Joseph Nye’s concept of “soft power” as the ability to shape outcomes through attraction rather than force, we reinterpret the idea through a design lens, exploring its quiet influence on our daily lives and creative culture.
What began as a series of group exhibitions now expands into a new editorial chapter as we continue to investigate the role of design in shaping culture. In September 2024, we debuted Soft–Power, spotlighting contemporary ceramicists reclaiming the handmade in an increasingly automated world.
Earlier this summer, we introduced our second installment: Counterpoint. The group exhibition featured four artists quietly, yet radically, reshaping the visual and material language of American design. From a sculptural meditation on soil erosion to a naturally dyed textile homage to sapphic memory, the show invited viewers to experience design not merely as a product, but as process, provocation, and personal archive.
Inspired in part by the musical form of counterpoint, where distinct melodies coexist in harmonic tension, the exhibition brought together four unique practices in dialogue, each retaining its own voice. Across mediums, these artists ask us to reconsider what design can do and who it’s for.
Ananas Ananas
Founded by Verónica González and Elena Petrossian, Ananas Ananas is a food-art studio exploring the intersection of sustainability, consumption, and sensory experience. Their work spans edible installation and experimental tableware, inviting audiences to slow down, touch, taste, and be present.
For this exhibition, the duo presents Trace, a conceptual exploration of soil erosion and its ties to modern agriculture. Crafted from discarded earth and hyper-locally sourced oyster shells from Baja California, the sculptural series visualizes the ecological impact of consumption. Ananas Ananas reminds us that food, like design, can be a site for both pleasure and protest, where intimacy meets inquiry.
Eny Lee Parker
Eny Lee Parker is a New York-based spatial designer working across furniture, lighting, and objects. Her practice centers on clay as a primary material, channeling traditional craftsmanship with a contemporary eye. Grounded in slowness, intention, and reverence for natural resources, her work invites us to consider the quiet power of everyday objects.
Rather than chase trends or spectacle, Parker’s pieces celebrate presence and the soft strength of form as well as the spirit of the handmade. In her hands, clay becomes a medium for meditation and meaning. Her portfolio, built over just six years, has already made an indelible mark on the design world, offering a vision that is at once grounded and transcendent.
Cara Marie Piazza
Cara Marie Piazza is a natural dye artist whose work intersects the liminal space between ceremony, atrophy and time. Through her creative agency and dye studio, Calyx, she offers natural dye applications across fashion, interiors, and the arts — treating fabric not just as a medium, but as a site of transformation.
Her piece, Rosyfingered Dusk, is stitched from the raw materials of her practice: blood-red ahimsa silk quilted into a visual and poetic fragment. Inspired by the remnants of Sappho’s poem 96, the work speaks to the erasure of sapphic histories, while also evoking the alchemical shifts one undergoes in becoming — into womanhood, into memory, into myth. Piazza’s process is slow and intentional, her palette sourced from nature and history alike. The result is work that holds space for beauty, grief, and reclamation.
Maja Długolecka
Los Angeles-based painter and curator Maja Długolecka approaches abstraction as autobiography. Her paintings, informed by a background in design and music, emerge from personal experiences and emotional impressions — layered in bold pigments, textured washes, and intuitive gestures.
Each piece serves as a timestamp, a record of thought rendered in color and movement. In lieu of a written journal, Maja assigns titles drawn from past memories, treating painting as a space to process the ephemeral. Her evolving technique invites experimentation and expression, challenging the limits of the medium and expanding the language of self-reflection in art.
In a world often defined by speed and dominance, Counterpoint offers a different rhythm grounded in care, nuance, and presence. Through this show and Soft–Power, we celebrate the individual and the collective. These artists, each distinct in practice, create a shared resonance: a harmony of intention, craft, and cultural inquiry. Together, they expand the story of American design by pushing boundaries, questioning norms, and making space for softer, slower forms of power.