SFMOMA, Floor 3 · September 14, 2024–May 9, 2027
In 1974 Martin Newell, a graduate student in the computer graphics program at the University of Utah, needed an interesting object to model. His wife Sandra suggested the white Melitta teapot they had bought at a Salt Lake City department store. Newell sketched its profile on graph paper and entered the coordinates by hand. In 1975 he released the data to other researchers.
The teapot was a near-perfect test case. It was round, it had a handle with a hole through it, it could cast shadows on itself, and it looked right without a texture. For two decades, programmers used it to test light, shade, reflection, and surface. It appeared as an in-joke in Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and The Simpsons. Pixar gave away wind-up walking teapots to promote its RenderMan software. Newell later joked that after everything he had done for computer graphics, he would be remembered for the teapot. The physical Melitta pot now sits in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
In 2015 the Oakland architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, working as Emerging Objects, printed Newell's digital teapot in powdered instant tea and sweetener on a binder-jetting 3D printer. They printed the cups and teaspoons too, each spoon sized to hold exactly five cubic centimeters, the volume of one teaspoon. They sealed every piece, because water would dissolve the set into a drink.
The Utah Tea Set now sits on a long banquet table on Floor 3 of SFMOMA. A household object became a digital standard, then a physical object again, made from the substance it was designed to hold.
The Table
Table Manners was curated by Daryl McCurdy, associate curator of architecture and design, and Divya Saraf, then curatorial assistant. It gathers around forty objects for eating and drinking from SFMOMA's collection, from the early 20th century to the 2020s. The objects are arrayed along a single banquet table. The walls are hung with tablecloths by Oakland artist Lucy Stark, illustrated with drawings of the objects on display. The curators frame the room as a dinner party with favorite artists that has just ended. The show opened in September 2024 and has been extended more than once.
The received idea of a design museum is a gallery of good form: tools engineered so well they disappear in the hand. Form follows function, and function is neutral. The strongest objects in this room work against that idea. They make eating visible as a performance with rules about bodies, class, and culture, and many of them break those rules on purpose.
1950s–1960s — The Functionalist Table
The baseline is on the table. Arne Jacobsen's AJ flatware (1957), designed for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, reduces knife, fork, and spoon to surgical outlines. Stanley Kubrick set it on the table in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as the cutlery of the future. Saraf compares the knife to a scalpel and notes a coldness in it.
Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, designed the TAC tea service for Rosenthal in the late 1960s with colleagues from The Architects Collaborative, his firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. McCurdy calls it unshowy. Saraf says its appeal shows only when the teapot is in the hand.
Even functionalist objects carry habits. Edith Heath, who founded Heath Ceramics in Sausalito, designed a studio mug for her Coupe line around 1950. Its handle lets a user hold a cup of coffee and a cigarette in the same fist. The curators describe it as two vices in one grip. The mug was designed for a specific body doing a specific thing, and that thing was not neutral.
1964 — An Asymmetrical Glass
Joe Colombo's Asimmetrico drinking glass (1964), first sold by Riedel, looks like a mistake. Its foot is a lopsided mound. In use, the mound rests in the palm and makes the glass harder to tip.
Colombo was a Milanese painter turned industrial designer who died in 1971, at forty-one, after a decade of modular furniture and futuristic domestic systems. The Asimmetrico is the hinge of this show. It looks as though it refuses function and turns out to serve it. The objects that follow are less forgiving.
1990 — The Juicer That Makes a Mess
Philippe Starck's Juicy Salif citrus reamer for Alessi is one of the most recognizable household objects of the late 20th century. According to Alberto Alessi, Starck sketched it on a paper placemat while squeezing lemon over a plate of squid at an Italian pizzeria, then mailed the stained sheet to Alessi. The cast aluminum reamer stands on three long legs.
It sprays juice over the hand that holds it. Its finish tarnishes. It tips over. McCurdy lists these faults plainly. Alessi himself has called the project a joke at the expense of form-follows-function. It has been a bestseller for more than thirty years, often bought to sit on a shelf.
Beside it are objects that make drinking deliberately difficult. Gumdesign's Swing wine glass, by the Italian designers Laura Fiaschi and Gabriele Pardi, has a glass bump under its foot, so it cannot stand level. McCurdy notes that it makes guests work and curbs how much they drink. The Geneva-based designer Jeremy Brown made a goblet with a long stem and no foot. Once a guest is holding it, the guest cannot put it down.
These are table manners in the literal sense. The object sets a rule, and the body complies or spills.
2005 — The Coke Spoon
In the late 1970s McDonald's introduced a plastic coffee stirrer with a small scoop at one end. It became widely known as a convenient cocaine spoon, and the company replaced it with a flat stirrer.
In 2005 the designer Tobias Wong, working with Ken Courtney's label Ju$t Another Rich Kid, cast the old stirrer in gold-plated metal as Coke Spoon 02, part of a series called Indulgent. Coke Spoon 01, also in SFMOMA's collection, is a gold version of a Bic pen cap. The series included gold-plated pills meant to be swallowed. McDonald's sent the retailer a cease-and-desist letter.
Wong's objects take disposable things associated with excess and turn them into luxury goods. The spoon on SFMOMA's table is a utensil for a substance, not a food. Wong died in 2010.
2022 — Status and Portraits
Virgil Abloh's Occasional Object for Alessi (2022) is a knife, fork, and spoon in perforated, sandblasted stainless steel, clipped together on a removable carabiner so the set can be worn. McCurdy says Abloh's work questioned the status quo. Alessi limited production to 999 numbered sets. Cutlery became a fashion accessory sold in a scarce edition.
Roberto Lugo's Lil Wayne and James Baldwin teapot (2022) puts the rapper on one side and the writer and civil rights activist on the other. Lugo is a Philadelphia-based Afro-Latino potter whose ceramics borrow the forms and ornament of European decorative porcelain to carry portraits that porcelain historically excluded.
Zaha Hadid's sterling-silver tea and coffee service miniaturizes the swooping forms of her buildings. It was made in so small an edition that, according to McCurdy, most sets are now in museums. At that point a tea service is no longer for tea.
2020 — A Spoon for Two
A group of objects addresses bodies that standard cutlery ignores. The exhibition includes self-stabilizing spoons and textured ergonomic utensils designed for hands that grip differently. The Korean designer Jinhyun Jeon makes spoons shaped to touch different parts of the mouth, drawing on synesthesia, the crossing of one sense into another. She describes them as rewiring how color, texture, temperature, and weight affect taste.
Isabel Rower's Intimate Spoon (2020) is a single circular spoon that two people use at once. Rower made it during the COVID-19 pandemic, when sharing a utensil had become a health risk and eating with another person had become a decision.
2023 — Mirrors for Aliens
The San Francisco studio soft-geometry, Utharaa Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary, both born in India and trained at the Savannah College of Art and Design, took steel thalis, the compartmented plates of Indian meals, and hand-polished them into mirrors. The title refers to the designers' classification as nonresident aliens under U.S. immigration terms. The polished surfaces return softly distorted reflections. A plate made to hold food now holds a face.
Hands Off
The curators' own frame of reference is part of the show. Saraf grew up in Kolkata, where many dishes were eaten with the fingers and she would not have thought to ask for a utensil. In that tradition, every object on this table is optional.
In the museum, every object on this table is forbidden. McCurdy notes that once a piece enters the collection, no one eats with it again. The AJ knife will not cut. The Juicy Salif will not drip. The tea set made of tea is sealed against the water that would complete it. 🌁
Timeline — Table Manners
c. 1950 — Edith Heath designs the Coupe studio mug.
1957 — Arne Jacobsen designs the AJ flatware for the SAS Royal Hotel, Copenhagen.
1964 — Joe Colombo designs the Asimmetrico drinking glass, first sold by Riedel.
1968 — Kubrick uses the AJ flatware in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Late 1960s — Walter Gropius and The Architects Collaborative design the TAC tea service for Rosenthal.
1971 — Colombo dies at 41.
1974 — Martin Newell models his Melitta teapot at the University of Utah.
1975 — Newell releases the Utah teapot data to other researchers.
Late 1970s — McDonald's introduces the scoop-ended coffee stirrer, later replaced.
1990 — Philippe Starck's Juicy Salif is produced by Alessi.
1995 — The Utah teapot appears in Toy Story.
2005 — Tobias Wong and Ju$t Another Rich Kid make Coke Spoon 01 and Coke Spoon 02 for the Indulgent series.
2010 — Wong dies.
2015 — Emerging Objects prints the Utah Tea Set from instant tea and sweetener.
2020 — Isabel Rower makes Intimate Spoon during the COVID-19 pandemic.
2022 — Roberto Lugo makes the Lil Wayne and James Baldwin teapot; Virgil Abloh's Occasional Object is released by Alessi in 999 sets.
2023 — soft-geometry proposes Mirrors for Aliens.
September 14, 2024 — Table Manners opens at SFMOMA.
May 9, 2027 — Table Manners closes, after more than one extension.