How different would the world be?

My name is Norman Teague.

I'm a designer and an educator here in Chicago.

I make things.

Sometimes it turns out to be furniture.

Sometimes it leans more towards sculpture.

My favorite material to work in has always been wood.

I can carve into it and sort of infuse in it this language that feels familiar to me from an ancestral standpoint.

It'll go this far, and then it stops.

Experimentation is the process.

We are driven by iteration.

We usually start with a sketch, and then we model them out digitally, allow the analog to influence the digital, and the digital to influence the final.

The MoMA show that I'm guest curator for this year is titled Jam Sessions.

And Jam Sessions is really a show that's about reimagining a past.

What would the MoMA's collection look like had Black designers been offered the same opportunity as these celebrated Bauhaus designers in 1920, 60, 70?

Firefly gave us the abilities to sort of visualize our thoughts, the what ifs of the canons that have been developed.

If we had influences like George Clinton and the Harlem Renaissance.

Firefly turned itself into a brainstorming catalyst, generating different kinds of chairs that won't exist, can't exist, have never existed.

We just wanted to push the envelope and see what would it look like if there was fur growing out of the surface of this chair?

Or what would it look like if there was an afro growing out of the surface of a chair instead of leather?

We took a lot of respect out of the randomness of it.

Part of why I look back to African traditions is because it's one of the things that I feel like I don't see within the canon of design.

I was excited to see these connections between jazz and hip hop as a young person like Jazz Mataz Guru.

It was an epic mixture of two genres coming together and relating to new groups of people.

Norman has a very jovial and playful style.

There's this exploration that is very apparent through his work.

When you're exploring things, experimentation is a key force that you're just like, oh shit, I didn't even think about that.

The MoMA show came to me and I was really hoping that I could continue to tell stories, share that with as many people that I can.

Just mixing all of that together is ultimately what I'm looking at in this imagination process.

And now we are a week out before I get in a car and drive to New York.

Most of the work that we're doing for the show is prototypes.

They're a significant way of allowing people to understand the way that our studio thinks and sort of learns from the prototype additions prior to getting to that.

In fact, there might even be some pink foam.

There will definitely be some pink foam in there.

Outside of the box is definitely a way to look at it.

How we could reimagine the what ifs of the world.

How this might just allow us to rethink that past with people of color as a part of that.

Hopefully a young black girl or boy would see this and understand that there's somebody out here telling a story that's very relative to your story and they're happy at it.