Meet the Next Craft Nouveau Artists: Jeff Davis and Martin Grasser

The Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami will offer an elegant backdrop today for the debut of Craft Nouveau’s two new collections by Jeff Davis and Martin Grasser, Optimism and Portraits.

If you’ve been following TRAME’s social media feeds, on X and Instagram, you may be familiar with the artists’ backgrounds and the collection concepts. Here’s a brief overview with links to additional details.

Jeff Davis

Optimism, 2023
Handcrafted stained glass with aluminum stand. Procedurally generated from custom algorithm.

Jeff Davis is a generative artist based in Arizona and the Strategic Advisor at Art Blocks. He was an art professor for 20 years. A keen interest in mathematics informed his artistic development. Initially focusing on painting and printmaking during graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his artistic journey evolved with a desire for greater precision. In 1999, he began to use design software to explore structures and colors to create digital art. Since then, he's been inspired by the use of technology for creative expression, building generative systems that explore form and color within specified parameters. A notable example is Jeff’s recent Schema collection, in collaboration with Pace Gallery, Art Blocks, and DRIFT.

Optimism is an ode to positivity and joy, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright. The beautiful stained glass collection was produced in collaboration with renowned Ateliers Loire in Chartres, France, with custom aluminum framing by California-based Neal Feay.

Martin Grasser

Portraits, 2023
Colored Venetian glass with aluminum frame. Procedurally-generated from the artist’s Abstract Type Generator.

Martin Grasser is an artist and designer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His journey in the world of fine art is driven by his deep connection with typography, which stems from a lifelong fascination with letterforms, words, and sentences, another form of art for Grasser. His diverse background includes designing the Twitter logo, storytelling for Nike, and creating the Color Dot Font. Since 2022, Grasser has taken his practice onto the blockchain with three notable generative series: Squares, LOVE, and Themes and Variations where he worked in collaboration with Vera Molnár a pioneer of computer art.

Portraits is Martin Grasser’s mirrored portrayal of the viewer, in color-coded splendor, produced in collaboration with bespoke manufacturer Arte Veneziana in Venice, Italy.

Many thanks to partners ARTXCODE and Art Blocks Engine on these two collections and special thanks to contributors, Chapter 2, Neal Feay, and Bacardi.

Coming Up

Post-exhibition, we will be sending a recap of the debut in Miami with photos of the full artworks from both collections. Follow our social media feeds on X and Instagram for developments as well as more beautiful images and videos.

Register for our upcoming private collector Zoom with the artists on December 12th at 12pm PT / 3pm ET.

You can visit our website for information on the first Craft Nouveau collection, Navette, by artist Alexis André.