About

A child of the 1970’s, John Mahoney traces his early aesthetic influences to disco and marimekko.  From a young age, he was surrounded by pattern and decoration, and his childhood home was filled with artifacts from his father’s travels in South Africa as well as drapes, bedspreads, and tablecloths churned out by his mother’s sewing machine.  He grew up in a mixed, urban neighborhood of Minneapolis, and learned how to batik by age 10.  His textured life has gone on to include stints at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, Chautauqua Institution, Amherst College, the Guggenheim Museum, and ARTS Magazine.

It was while renovating a loft in a remote part of Brooklyn that John became fascinated with Makita power tools and began to incorporate their parts in his artwork.  A challenging period in his life, John says he came to rely on his router more than some of his friends at the time. Soon motor spindles and crankshafts appeared in everything he created, from drawings and paintings to T-shirts, stickers, and turntable pads.  

"I believe art is life, and it wasn’t enough for me to create paintings and sculptures. Instead I wanted to create a whole lifestyle based on power, tools, and Japan" he says. Body paintings, window paintings, paintings on silk, wall murals, banners, T-shirts,  kimonos– nothing was safe from John’s spray gun and stencils.

His first trip to Japan expanded his appreciation of Japan beyond their power tools and began a life-long love affair with the land of Rising Sun. An epiphany at the Tokyo National Museum made clear that in the Japanese tradition there is no distinction between art, craft, and design. Now, on his subsequent visits to Japan, he gathers evidence everywhere of art as life: from serving tea and arranging flowers to layering a kimono or pruning trees.

 "Japanese ideas about art were a huge relief to me, after being trained as an artist in the Western tradition.  The European artistic trajectory over the last 500 years had been a specialization of art that resulted in the fetishization of oil and canvas.  Whereas in Japan, the scope of art had been widening– not narrowing.  There was scarcely an area of everyday life in Japan untouched by artistic efforts and values."

John used the proceeds from a warehouse sale at his studio in 2002 to found his design studio with the mission "to design outstanding works of decorative art that bring joy to current generations and inspiration to future ones."  His signature collection of handmade rugs and hand-screened wallpapers are based on motifs from his original artworks, and his artistic yet usable designs have gained a loyal following.

John’s work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and has been featured by the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, National Public Radio, the New York Times Style Magazine, and the New Yorker.  He spends weekends with his partner at their one-room schoolhouse in upstate New York nurturing a native garden, sketching new designs, and expanding his Japanese vocabulary.  He is currently producing a collection of hooked cotton rugs that will retail in stores in 2010 and designing fabrics for an upcoming line of soft goods.