Mohawk Group
Role
Creative Director, ArtLifting
team
5 commissioned artists · Mohawk Group design teams · ArtLifting internal team
timeline
2022–2023
01
a seat at the table
The partnership with Mohawk Group began before the commission. Existing works licensed from our artists were adapted into flooring collections, and that first partnership worked — its success is what earned the five-artist commission that followed.
The partnership came to me the way most did: already shaped on the business side, with terms and constraints written down. My job was to evaluate it as the artists' proxy — to read what was actually on the page and decide whether it was good enough to be workable for everyone it touched, and only then to make the case where the value was real. The Chief Growth Officer and I read the same deal from different seats. Hers weighed the commercial exposure — exclusivity risk, whether the terms constrained future optionality, whether the structure was sound; mine weighed the creative terms — whether the work could survive being decomposed, whether the artists were being asked to sign something they'd stand behind, whether the deal was executable on the creative side without eroding what made it worth doing. Working as a public-benefit company means the artist is a stakeholder that matters, and the artists weren't part of this side of the business. You can't bring every artist into every potential deal, so someone had to hold their seat: to get the partnership firm and real enough that I could take actual terms back to each artist and let them decide for themselves.
What the partnership brought was position. Mohawk is one of the largest names in commercial flooring and corporate facilities, and collaborating with a partner at that scale is its own validation — you only get a voice at the table if you're already in the room. Against that, the exclusivity and financial terms looked thin, and the exclusivity read as a real risk until I ran it down: it covered a small number of images, in a category where we held no product and no market share, and if it ever did constrain us, that would mean our work in flooring was succeeding — the outcome we wanted, and the cue to renegotiate or find a more equitable partner from strength.
The harder question was where I spent most of my time. Every piece would be taken apart — its elements isolated and recombined into something new — and an artist's work being pulled into parts is not a small thing to ask. Some worried it would be treated as spare parts rather than valued whole. I coordinated with each artist directly, walked them through both sides, and made sure the choice to take part was theirs. The fit ran deeper than the terms: Mohawk built the initiative around social enterprise, the same ground we stood on — profit in service of a public good. No single partnership has to be everything. Each is one piece, and enough pieces in place is what keeps you in the room for the opportunities you can't yet see.
02
making authorship portable
Many of the artists I represented at ArtLifting came to their practice outside the usual training structures, and for them, documenting process wasn't part of how they worked — the value lived in the object, the painting or the collage, not in a record of the decisions behind it. Plenty of working artists document rigorously; this group simply hadn't built the habit. That's the gap this partnership exposed, and the one I built for.
Mohawk needed more than a high-resolution scan. To carry a collection onto their product pages, into their brochures, and across their trade-show floors, they needed the story of how the work was made and what it meant. So I built a documentation practice specifically for this engagement — just enough structure to keep the record consistent across artists while leaving room for how each one actually worked: a standard set of directional questions that flexed to the individual.So the brief inverted. Instead of scheduling the call faster, we asked what the call was for, and whether the interface could carry each of those jobs on its own.
The method mattered as much as the questions. Documentation had to happen before, during, and after the work, rather than assembled at the end. Capture only at the finish and the record starts at the finish — you lose the forks, the decisions, the moments where the work turned. Done as it happened, at each real decision point, the record held the richer story, and the finished narrative could be pulled from that raw material later, once the artwork and the design existed to point back to. For most of these artists, narrating the work was the unfamiliar part — not the making, which was intuitive and in the moment, but the stepping back to say what they'd done and why. So the work was as much coaching as capture — putting words to a process that had always run on instinct.
If a call exists only to read values back to someone, the call is a missing default.
03
recognized on the industry's terms
Five artists were commissioned, and their work resolved into four collections: three carried by a single artist each — Connie Avery's Mycotopia, Laria Saunders' Wild Dyer, Lindsey Holcomb's Taking Root — and one, Entangled Earth, shared by two. Mohawk paired each collection with its own design team, and I sat in on every artist-designer meeting as a light-touch resource — close enough to know exactly what was discussed, so an artist could come back to me afterward with full context, but out of the way of the work itself. That's the version of this I want: the artist owning the execution and the vision, with support there if it's needed. Some pairs went further on their own, trading work in progress directly — Connie Avery and her designer built the kind of working relationship that is the whole point.
Three of the collections were recognized nationally, across five of the industry's award programs — NeoCon, Interior Design's Best of Year, MetropolisLikes, HiP, and the IIDA/HD Expo awards. Industry recognition is a specific kind of proof: the judges are paid to be hard on flooring, to look for what falls short. When the awards landed, they came through as emails from Mohawk's team that I could pass on to the artists — a direct signal that the work held up on terms far outside the one it was made in.
04
what i took from it
5
4
3
Commission Direction
Partnership Vetting
Process & Narrative
Artist Coaching
Commercial Judgment