After an 11-year NFL career that included a Super Bowl championship with the Seattle Seahawks and three trips to the Pro Bowl, Michael Bennett is taking a path often taken by retired athletes and moving into coaching and broadcasting. It should have been easy too. But Bennett had other things in mind.
In 2020, in response to the creative calling he has felt most of his life, he founded Studio Kër, a design studio and brand specializing in sculptural furniture and homewares.
“I’ve always had a passion for design,” Bennett said. “My brother likes to joke that I always had good taste even when I was growing up, whether it was clothes or the things I liked.”
Studio Kër allows Bennett to explore her design eye, incorporating the history and traditions of the African diaspora as well as contemporary social justice themes. Bennett, who studied at the Heritage School of Interior Design and is currently pursuing a degree in architecture from the University of Hawaii, devotes significant time and resources to social activism, and his search for justice informs his design aesthetic. It’s permeating.
Mo-Mo dining table design by Michael Bennett.
“I’ve always worked with the idea of broken systems and protesting them in mind. When you really look at the world, it comes down to design,” he said. “Ghettos are not natural, they are designed without empathy. I started thinking about design as a form of resistance.”
Studio Care’s first collection, which debuted earlier this year and was designed by Bennett and the late industrial designer Imhotep Brot, was guided by a sense of resistance to oppression and respect for the black experience. Kea is the word for “home” in the Wolof culture, Senegal’s largest ethnic group, and Bennett discovered that her family’s roots lie there. Connecting his ancestral homeland with his current life as a black man in America was always in mind when creating this line of work.
“Being African American in America means confronting the history of slavery, so you may not know exactly where you come from,” he said. “When I did a DNA ancestry study, I discovered that my ancestors were from Senegal. That was central to how I thought about home and community through object architecture.”
Bennett’s Mo-Mo dining table draws inspiration from artist Akili Ron Anderson’s “Last Supper” sculpture and from her family’s traditions, both West African and Black American. A substantial circular table with a rotating tray for serving food can accommodate up to 10 people and encourage guests to gather and connect through food and conversation.
“This chart speaks to the history and importance of matriarchy in black families,” he says. “I take these experiences seriously because while I am a native American, I have remnants of a very West African past.”
The ‘Gumbo’ lounge chair is partly inspired by DC Simpson’s stacking polypropylene ‘Monoblock’ chair and is made from fiberglass and cushions. Additionally, the “Paw Paw” dining chair, made from African Sapele or Argentine Rosewood, has an asymmetrical spine that reflects patterns found in traditional West African culture.
“This idea of asymmetry in objects, I’m looking at how these shapes and structures relate to the history of black communities in America,” Bennett said.
Bennett is currently studying architecture, which allows her to play around with the structure and form of her designs even more.
“Architecture influences everything I do,” he said. “I feel like there’s an architectural connection to how I build what I’m designing, whether it’s furniture, doorknobs or candle containers.”
Bennett has strived to tell her own story through her designs while also ensuring that other people of color have the same opportunities. In 2021, he established an endowment at the Rhode Island School of Design to bring more talent to the school from marginalized and underserved communities. He said supporting the next generation of designers of color helps not only individual students but the culture as a whole.
“It goes back to systems thinking. A system doesn’t change until the part becomes part of the whole,” he said. “Thus, people of color will have more access to design, and by becoming designers, they will be able to apply those skills to their own communities, leading to changes that can cause major paradigm shifts.” There is a possibility.”
As Studio Kër evolves with Bennett as a designer, he says he refuses to be fixed by medium or aesthetic and is open to where the journey takes him. And whatever he designs, he believes this practice connects and uplifts not only current community members, but also the ancestors who came before them.
“I don’t think of myself as one type of designer,” he said. “I consider myself a spatial designer who is always thinking about how we interact with space, whether it is through objects or the layout of a room. These artifacts serve as references that connect us to our cultural history.”
