Greg Kwiat, whose “thinking is as clear as the diamonds he’s selling” is the CEO of Kwiat, a four-generation family company founded in 1907.

In this interview we talk about what it was like growing up in a diamond family, the history of the diamond industry, De Beers dominating role, and the legendary advertising campaign “A Diamond is Forever” to stimulate demand in the 1950s and how Miuccia Prada, Nicole Kidman and Fred Leighton became pioneers in displaying beautiful vintage jewelry on the red carpet at the Oscars.

Greg also gives us an insightful guide about the basic knowledge you need to make more educated choices, when buying diamonds, based on the four Cs; carat weight, color, clarity and cut. In 2018 Kwiat and Fred Leighton opened their combined flagship stores on Madison Avenue and at the Wynn Las Vegas, bringing two iconic brands under one roof.

and-company.com/about/principals/">Evan Snyderman and and-company.com/about/principals/">Zesty Meyers, owners, and co-founders of the and-company.com/">R & Company Gallery, have managed to transform their passion for design into one of the world's finest design galleries.

With an obsession for seeking deeper beauty of design objects, and a philosophy based on teamwork, collaboration, and a cross-disciplinary approach, they have defined a full-blown global trade called Collectible Design.

In this interview we talk about their creative, and entrepreneurial journey from the B Team, a performance-based glass-artist collaborative group, via the Wild West of the Chelsea Flee market, to exploring design markets in Brazil and Scandinavia. They share the story of how an unexpected sale of Marcel Breuer commissioned furniture, laid the foundation of the gallery we know today.   

R & Company exhibits historic designers and represents 22 contemporary artists, creating unique works, limited, editions, and site-specific installations. The present exhibition at 64 White Street includes Katie Stout, a young Brazilian designer Zanine de Zanine and Jeff Zimmerman.

Photo credit Francois Dischinger

(Evan is slightly to the left and Zesty is slightly to the right in the audio recording)

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is an award-winning American geographer and writer. In his latest book “Names of New York”, he traces the ways in which native Lenape, Dutch settlers, British invaders, and successive waves of immigrants, have left their marks on the city’s map.

In this interview, we talk about how several places in New York got their names: Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bowery, Greenwich Village, Spuyten Duyvil, Lackawanna, Boerum Hill, Gramercy Park, Rockaway, to mention a few. We talk about how place matters to us as human beings and how it shapes our believes about who we are.

We also discuss more complex issue relating to place naming, for example, 70 streets in Brooklyn are named after slave owners. Should these names be erased from the city scape, or should they remain as a historic marker?

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a regular contributor to “The New York Review of Books”.  He lives in New York and is a scholar in residence at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, where he also teaches.

Photographer credit: Mirissa Neff.

Richard Saul Wurman is one of the most influential American architects and graphic designers of our time. He created the TED Conference, most popularly known as the TedTalks series.

Early in his career, he coined the term “Information Architecture”, which defined a new era and addressed design solution for communicating rising amounts of data. Richard is driven by a singular passion in his life: making information understandable for both himself and others. 

In this interview, he discusses being in the business of what he calls "the next idea" where his greatest value and expertise is his ignorance. His latest venture includes establishing “The Wurman Center for Understanding Understanding” at the Rochester Institute of Technology.  

For Richard, learning is the process of remembering what you are interested in. Throughout our conversation, you may yourself listening with a smile. That's because of Richard’s wit, brutal honesty, and crystal-clear analysis of complex issues.

Award-winning photographer Mark Seliger was Rolling Stone’s Chief Photographer from 1992-2002, where he shot over 175 covers. From 2002-2012, he was on contract with Condé Nast where he shot regularly for Vanity Fair and GQ.

We talk about Mark’s latest book “The City That Finally Sleeps", where during the pandemic, “he took to the desolate streets, camera in hand and often in the quietest hours … these hauntingly beautiful portraits of New York’s streets and cityscapes grip the viewer in varying balances of beauty, sorrow, wonder and quiet concern.” All the proceeds from the sale of the book goes to New York Cares in their covid-19 relief efforts.

We also talk about Mark’s creative process as a photographer, as well as a singer and songwriter. The song "1,000 Kisses" in the interview is performed by Mark Seliger’s country and western band Rusty Truck.

Mark Seliger is the recipient of such esteemed awards as the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award. The Lucie Award, The Clio Grand Prix, Cannes Lions Grand Prix to mention a few.

Bella Neyman and JB Jones are the co-founders of NYC Jewelry Week, an annual event dedicated to promoting and celebrating the world of jewelry, from the window shopper to the avid collector.

NYC Jewelry Week is about creating an intimate emotional connection with jewelry; giving consumers a way to get to know artists, learn the history and explore all the stories that bring unique pieces to life. 

This year’s event is free and open to the public and will take place November 15-21, under the theme “The Power of Jewelry.” The power to seduce, inspire, and communicate. Not only as an object and an adornment for the body, but how objects make you feel, like an adornment for the soul.

On this episode, Bella and JB talk about this year’s program with around 80 events over multiple platforms. Among them, exciting collaborations with The Museum of Arts and Design, Bergdorf Goodman, The Art Salon + Design, 1stDibs, and 92Y, just to mention a few.

They also give us some breaking news!  The launch of a ground- breaking new Virtual Booth concept that will connect jewelry artists and consumers around the world and a new app that maps New York's jewelry retailers, hand-selected by the two founders.

team.html">Kyle Bergman is the founder and director of ADFF, the Architecture & Design Film Festival, which is the world’s largest film festival devoted to the creative spirit of architecture and design. 

With a curated selection of films, events, and panel discussions, in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Washington DC, Vancouver and on-line, ADFF creates an opportunity to entertain, engage and educate everyone who are excited about architecture and design

In this interview Kyle talks about architecture as storytelling, the striking resemblance between the art of making film and the art of making architecture. We talk about how important it is to use the film medium to expand the conversation about the role of architecture and design today.

We discuss “knowledge of design”, a separated kind of knowledge, that tells us when something is well designed or not, and this fall’s major event when ADFF and MoMA will showcase the documentary about the genius of Bruce Mau. 

Kyle also gives us some great recommendations of films we must watch and reflects on the fact that the films, that make it to the festival, often have an emotional and engaging human dimension in them 

Richard Florida is a professor at the University of Toronto and distinguished visiting fellow at lab.html#RichardFlorida2">New York University. He is a co-founder and editor at large of CityLab and a senior editor at The Atlantic. 

He is best known for the concept of the creative class and its implications for urban regeneration  expressed in his best-selling book “The Rise of the Creative Class”.

In this very entertaining interview Richard speaks candidly about his personal background, “a kid from Newark”, and how his childhood experiences and passion for rock’n’roll music have influenced his professional career.

We talk about the pandemic and its effects on the future of urban working life, the genius of Jane Jacobs, the Bilboa effect and the importance of intuition in his academic work. We also talk about how the Creative Class’ back to the city movement, finds a home for itself amidst a hotbed of controversial sociocultural topics: gentrification, displacement and inequity, and Richard’s vision for how to choreograph a more powerful dialogue to solve these issues.

Photo by Roshan Nebhrajani 

Paula Scher is one of the most acclaimed graphic designers in the world. She has been a principal at the New York office of the distinguished international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991, where she has designed identity systems, environmental graphics, packaging, and publications for a wide range of clients.

Today, we find Paula in her studio among her paintings and a collector’s item Porsche that she has hand-painted with an artistic rendering of a map of the Unites States for a special exhibition. In this interview, Paula explains her metaphor for coming up with new ideas as a “slot machine”, talks about typography as it relates to spirit and meaning, and tells inspiring stories from her design collaborations with the Public Theater, Shake Shack, MoMA, Citibank, The High Line, and Rockaway Beach.   

Paula has been the recipient of hundreds of industry honors including the National Design Award and the AIGA medal. She is an established artist exhibiting worldwide, and her designs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the Library of Congress, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other institutions. A documentary on Paula and her work can be seen in the Netflix series “Abstract: The Art of Design.”

enderby.net">Emma Enderby is the Chief Curator at The Shed at Hudson Yards, a unique art institution with a bold vision of and for the century we are in.

In this fascinating interview, Emma talks passionately about the guiding principles that helped building the program and how “artists can tell us realities of our time; stories of the past can predict the future, so important in helping us understand the moment that we are in.” We discuss what makes good art; her personal taste in art as well as books and artists that inspire her, among them Agnes Denes and Hilma af Klint.

Commissions are at the heart of The Shed’s mission -- one prime example being their annual “Open Call,” which opens on June 3 this year. “Open Call” is a series of exhibitions and events aimed at providing invaluable support, visibility, and recognition to New York's early-career artists, working across all forms and media. This year “Open Call” received 1,500 proposals and features 27 artists. 

The Shed's remarkably innovative design is at the core of its support of artists’ visions and the work they create – from hip hop to classical music, visual art to literature, film to theatre or dance, and beyond, all under one roof. Or in this case, no roof is an option!  

Photo: Scott Rudd Events © 2018