About KHEM Studios

KHEM Studios was founded by Kari Lorenson and Erik Guzman — both trained sculptors with graduate degrees from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and combined decades of professional practice across fine art, fabrication, design, and academic instruction.

Before furniture, they built careers in art and fabrication, and both have taught at the School of Visual Arts for more than a decade.

Kari Lorenson works at the intersection of material, textile, and digital fabrication. She earned her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, where she went on to serve as a professor and operations manager in the Fine Arts department — developing curriculum, building out specialized fabrication and materials labs, and overseeing more than 100 student studios. Beyond the academy, she developed and produced textile surfacing for The Haas Brothers — whose work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper Hewitt, and LACMA — and contributed prototype work to the Rihanna: Fenty × Phaidon limited edition (2019).

Erik Guzman's sculpture has been exhibited internationally and reviewed in Sculpture Magazine, artnet, BBC and The Brooklyn Rail. His public art includes Weather Beacon, a kinetic sculpture that translated live weather data into motion and light, presented at New York's World Financial Center as part of the 2010 River to River Festival. As a fabricator, he has produced works for contemporary artists now held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and The Broad. Within the School of Visual Arts' Fine Arts department, he founded the Digital Sculpture Lab and served as Director of Operations.

Together they directed a Digital Fabrication Residency Program and founded Art Design Fabrication, a full-service art fabrication company.

Furniture was the studio's founding discipline. Our hardwood cutting boards and kitchen objects — recognized by The New York Times, Martha Stewart, Food & Wine, and Oprah's Favorite Things — extended that material practice to a broader audience.

Every piece in the collection is an original design, developed in-house and built to order from solid American hardwoods in our New York studio. We use precision engineering for structural accuracy, then hand-assemble and hand-finish every piece. The same thinking that shaped sculpture for museum collections now shapes furniture for living and dining spaces.

We do not reproduce historical forms. We do not work in veneers or composites. We design slowly, produce intentionally, and build to last.

For trade inquiries, visit our Trade page.