R & Company in Venice: in conversation with Zesty Meyers and Francesca DiMattio

The fourth Homo Faber Biennial opened on September 1st, 2026 at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice and runs to the end of the month. This edition is titled An Island of Light and has been shaped by Es Devlin as artistic director, with fifteen installations laid out across the island’s historic buildings and gardens. 500 artisans from over 70 countries have contributed, and roughly 700 objects are on view. The theme returns, again and again, to three things held together: a material, a source of light, and the hand that works them.

R & Company is taking part for the first time. The New York gallery has brought three American craft artists to Venice—Francesca DiMattio, Jeff Zimmerman, and Roberto Lugo—each working in a medium with a long decorative history and each treating that history as material rather than inheritance. For hube, Meyers and DiMattio spoke about what brought them to the island.

Zesty Meyers came to dealing from the workshop floor. He trained as a glassblower and worked professionally in glass before opening a gallery. He founded R & Company with Evan Snyderman in 1997, at a point when American museums were stepping back from craft and the word itself had become a liability. The gallery was built to close that gap: research first, then exhibitions, publications, and long-term representation, applied to design and craft with the apparatus a contemporary art gallery would give a painter.

While in Venice, Meyers is also taking part in the first Homo Faber Summit, a gathering of 150 invited makers, executives, and cultural directors held 16–18 September. He joins the closing panel, Investing in our Future Heritage, on the final day.

hube: R & Company has long championed work that lives between form and function. Looking back, what moments or artists first convinced you that collectible design could hold the same cultural weight as contemporary art?

Zesty Meyers: Before I had a gallery, I was a maker. I was a professional glassblower, and also ran a not-for-profit arts organisation, the B Team, that did installation and performance art with molten glass. Inherently, I’ve always known how to make things. I was exhibiting in galleries, some of the work was in museums, other kinds of exhibitions were happening. It was great.

R & Company comes out of my own practice and the B Team. We wanted to do something we found was lacking, that wasn’t there in the marketplace—or maybe there wasn’t even a marketplace. In the mid-to-late nineties in America, craft and design were dying. And yet on the secondary market, at Christie’s or Sotheby’s, things from the mid-twentieth century had started to sell for a lot of money. But I couldn’t learn more about most of those objects, because there were no books, no periodicals, no magazines writing about them. The two things didn’t make sense together. In the craft world, galleries were closing, museums weren’t really collecting anymore, and there was a small crop of artists who had made it and were eating up most of the market share.

So we simply started to look at designers who weren’t as famous as the superstars. In Finland, for example, everybody knows Alvar Aalto—but who was number two or three behind Alvar Aalto? There had to be other people. Why didn’t we know their names? Back in the nineties you couldn’t just find a book on Finnish design in America; that was exceptionally rare. So we started going to antiquarian bookshops to learn about what had happened in the world. And we were crazy enough that we would come up with these ideas, then fly to Helsinki and start walking around town, asking anyone who spoke English whether they knew anything about craft or design, because we couldn’t speak Finnish. Then we would find our way to an antiquarian bookshop and buy every book we could. Even though we couldn’t read Finnish, we could at least identify who had made the work, or get a better idea. That’s one of the ways we started to build the history.

It was never one artist who convinced us. It wasn’t one designer that was the interest. We could only do so much in a given week or month or year, and it’s still the same to this day. There are so many more people I would love to do projects with, work with, take on, build a career for. Our biggest enemy is time.

The difference in the contemporary fine art world was that if you became known there, you were included in museum shows, people were writing about you, and eventually you had a book. So we simply decided to take design and craft and elevate them the same way a fine art gallery would. We copied the model of how they run a stable of talent. We would put a credenza on a pedestal, and all of a sudden people would talk about it in a different way. They would ask questions like: why was this made? Why is this important? That’s how we started to change the way the market looked at things—or to create a market at all.