For American artist Dozie Kanu, Knoll was always a benchmark of design excellence. The Houston, Texas native was working across different design practices in New York City after graduating, and the company's work was a recurring theme; its essential contribution to the history of design was clear to him from the beginning of his career.
Ten years on, and the American company is now unveiling its first collaboration with the artist, a trio of tables that encapsulate his multifaceted artistic philosophy while speaking to the larger heritage of Knoll.
Dozie Kanu at his studio in Portugal with the console from his collection with Knoll
To be launched by Knoll at Salone del Mobile 2026, The Dozie Kanu Table Collection includes a console, a coffee table and a side table, characterised by a tasselled design in leather. Inspirations include an African drum, African ceremonial dress, and the fringed jackets popular in Texas Cowboy culture.
'True to Knoll design principles, Dozie's work expresses a singular cultural perspective that feels unmistakably contemporary,' says creative director Jonathan Olivares, whose first conversations with Kanu about the collaboration happened around the same time of his appointment as senior vice president of design in 2022. 'Drawing on a wide range of influences, he transforms reference into a kind of artistic alchemy. By approaching design through a sculptural lens, his pieces for Knoll animate space with a distinct attitude, while remaining direct in structure and function.'
Dozie Kanu: creativity at the cusp of cultures
Dozie Kanu at his studio in Portugal
This mixing of cultures is recurrent across the work of Kanu, who grew up in Texas with Nigerian parents, moved to New York at 18, and now lives in Portugal. His work – installations, exhibitions and the objects within – uses spatial design to explore themes of domesticity, memory and cultural belonging. Often created using found materials and scrap metals, the results of his practice shake up what is familiar through newly imagined forms.
‘I bring my upbringing into the work, and not only because it’s what I really, truly know: I also think it’s important for the history of design’
Dozie Kanu
'[Design] is an area where I feel like creativity for African diasporic people is present, but it's not fully pronounced in a lot of ways,' he notes. 'That's why I bring my upbringing and my biography into the work, and not only because it's what I really, truly know. It's where a lot of my truth comes from but I also think it's important for the history of design.'
He cites the African influence on contemporary art and sculpture in particular and the alienation that exists within that relationship – a territory that, he admits, he is still exploring through his work and beyond.
Dozie Kanu and Knoll
Dozie Kanu and Jonathan Olivares outside the artist's studio in Portugal
Having discovered his work in 2017, Olivares became a mentor of sorts for Kanu, essentially coaching him throughout the collaboration to give him the tools to create a series of objects that would work in a consumer-led sphere.
Olivares suggested that Kanu develop a piece from his 2021 installation Blood Type at Performance Space New York, an all-red room for which he created furniture that included a stool representing a rudimentary early ideas of the new table collection.
'[Jonathan] helped me understand how I should be approaching this, both fully understanding this landscape but also at the same time how to shake things up,' says Kanu. 'From there, we figured out a way to speak within these parameters.'
Another concern of the pair was that the collaboration didn't feel like a clash with Kanu's design-led artistic practice, which is why they landed on a series of tables. 'There's something that you're able to do with the table, you're providing a service, and there's something beautiful in the simplicity of that,' Kanu continues.
The original idea featured a reinforced steel bar structure on which a piece of leather was draped in a manner similar to a Nigerian drum, fringing down in a way that referenced 'the masquerade costumes that you would see in the villages from from where my parents were brought up.
'I felt like I was addressing a lot of biography with this particular story, which I think is important when thinking about material culture because of the absence of the black consciousness within [this area of design].'
Most importantly, Knoll was able to elevate Kanu's references while keeping his voice in the project: 'They found a way for me to speak as sharply as possible.'
He describes the final objects as being so precise as to become 'almost jarring': the way the tassels slightly hover above the ground, how they lightly sway as you walk past, it feels alive.
Despite being widely considered an artist, Kanu describes himself as an 'exhibition maker', a role that allows him to take a critical point of view through an aesthetically led practice. Coinciding with Milan Design Week 2026, Kanu will also be showing work at ICA Milano, in an exhibition titled ‘The Second Shadow. Dozie Kanu Mirroring Marc Camille Chaimowicz, with Shared Echoes and Kindred Spirits’, featuring his spatial response to the work of the late artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, evoking the work of Jean Cocteau.
'There's an immersive quality to making exhibitions. You can pretty much fill [them] with any creative input or creative gesture that you would like,’ he reflects. ‘So the way that I look at this project is interesting,’ he adds of his Knoll collaboration, ‘because I'm curious to see what these objects from Knoll look like when thrown into the language of making an exhibition, and if the work is vibrating on a level where it can suspend your idea of it to the level of sculpture.'