TV

Vivian Beer on taking her shot at winning “Ellen’s Design Challenge”

Over the last few weeks, we’ve introduced you to the three out lesbian contestants on HGTV’s second season of Ellen’s Design Challenge. On the last episode, we saw Alexis Moran get sent home, but Melissa Rivera Torres is still in the running, as is this week’s interview subject, Vivian Beer.

Vivian, who is from Manchester, New Hampshire, studied at Cranbrook Academy of Arts and has owned her own furniture design business, Vivian Beer Studio Works, for the last 10 years. She says she “loves to push the envelope with her work by using industrial materials such as concrete and auto body paint.”

photos via HGTV

We spoke with Vivian about getting into furniture design and her experience on the show.

AfterEllen: How did you first become involved with design?

Vivian Beer: Well, I would say I really fell in love with design while I was in graduate school. I went to Cranbrook Academy of Art out in Michigan, and I was in their metals program. My background is sculpture and metalworking but while I was there, I really, really fell in love with contemporary design. I fell in love with it, to some degree, in an unusual way. Because while I was studying metalsmithing-which at the time, that program had a lot of latitude as far as what you would make-but it had its core programming, as far as research, in the history of the decorative arts. So I was in this program that was talking about decorative arts and also eavesdropping the professor of design constantly-its funny, I’m actually headed out to do a visiting artist date with the design program there.

AE: In Michigan?

VB: Yes.

AE: I’m actually from Michigan, so this is even more intriguing!

VB: Oh great! I haven’t been back in a really long time, and Detroit has gone through so many changes since 2009. I’m pretty excited to spend some time in the area. I’ve already made plans to visit with Kyle from the show and check out his shop.

AE: Oh cool!

VB: Yeah! Anyway, that sort of speaks to how the school allows for a lot of cross-disciplinary studies and you are able to really go to other critiques and all of the other things they have to offer. It was decorative arts alongside just discovering design as a subject. So that’s sort of the long version, but the short version is there’s a tradition for a yearly cross-disciplinary chair show there, and one of the architecture students asked me to do the show with them. And I made a chair, and I have never lost interest in that subject since. It was just like “Oh my god, this is it! This is what has been missing.”

In a lot of ways, when I was studying sculpture and making sculpture, I was doing all of these sort of pieces that involved mechanical movement or that had an effort to make you want to touch it or make it do something. And it was a huge barrier in visual arts because when you think of sculpture, it is predominately a visual thing, so you are expected to look at it and have this sort of intellectual experience with it by just looking. I wanted that phenomenological experience, and I wanted that to be part of it. So when I made furniture, I thought, “Oh sweet! Now I don’t have to try to get people to want to touch it.” The touch and function was instantaneous. So it was this perfect moment.

AE: So when did you decide you were going to audition for the show?

VB: Well, the casting company called me and asked me to do it, so I put together the information they were asking for.

AE: So they contacted you to ask you to submit an audition tape?

VB: Yes.

AE: How do you think they found you?

VB: I never asked them, actually, but they had asked me to audition in the first season, but I couldn’t make the schedule that year-I was doing a fellowship at the Smithsonian during the filming, but one of my former assistants was on the first season. I mean, it’s a small world [laughs] in furniture design, you know. So I never asked how they found my name, but it’s such a small community that I think it’s pretty easy to find the people who are practicing.

AE: Wow, what an honor!

VB: I think one of the opportunities of the show is sharing this community with the rest of the country. It’s pretty tight-knit and small, but it’s really an awesome group of people. It’s a very warm and sharing community, but at the same time it’s competitive, and you are inherently competing with each other, basically, every day, yet I’ve never met anyone who wanted to hide a technique from you. People share information so it’s a really special community.

AE: After you sent in your audition tape, what were you thinking or feeling about it?

VB: Well, I think even before I sent it in, it took a full court press between my wife, my sister-in-law and one of my studio mates basically telling me “You’re going to do this.” [laughs] They gave me absolutely no choice. I think the person who really put it into perspective for me and framed my views going into it was my sister-in-law. We were talking about it, and she said, “Of course you need to do this,” and pointed out that I haven’t had an “assignment” or having someone tell me what to do in more than 10 years. I run my own business; I make pieces by spec and I work on commission, so I haven’t had that kind of challenge since I was in college.

AE: Wow, that sounds so intense. [laughs]

VB: [laughs] Intense but also really refreshing. Something that is so radically different than my day-to-day in the studio.

AE: So when you arrived on the first day were you scoping everyone out, checking out your competition?

VB: They made sure we didn’t meet each other off-screen prior to the show, so we literally walked into the building with cameras on, so what you were seeing in the casting episode, was literally us meeting each other right then and there.

AE: In the casting episode, when they said they were sending home two people right then based on the assignment you had to do prior to shooting the first day, I was so nervous for everyone, I can’t imagine what you were thinking?

VB: [laughs] What I was thinking honestly, was, “Thank god my wife made me take that assignment seriously.” I had just come off a solo show-I was finishing up and dropping off this 300-pound cast bench. I was crazy busy and trying to compress all of the things I needed to do before I left for the show; I had maybe two days to finish the assignment because we got it like the night before we fly out. But my wife just said, “You sit down and do your homework.” It ties back into what I said about my sister-in-law in that this was my first assignment.

AE: So was your wife with you when Ellen called you to tell you that you were going to be on the show?

VB: Yes she was! I think maybe she was freaking out more than I did. I don’t think any of us were expecting Ellen to be the one to call us, we had been working with the producers and the casting company so to have her be on the phone, it was like “OK, this is actually happening.”

AE: I’m pretty sure I would have went fangirl and just been screaming “I love you” into the phone.

VB: [laughs] I’m just so excited that she is using her star power to promote furniture! I mean let’s be honest: She could host anything she wants, but she chose furniture design. Being a furniture designer is not something that happens in the public eye, it happens privately, so to have her want to promote that is awesome.

AE: I can only imagine what it was like to meet her!

VB: [laughs] What was so great about meeting her is that she would always appear when you least expected her to! I mean she’s like a sneaky, funny ninja, so you have to imagine we are really stressed, crunched for time and then all of a sudden-ta-da!-Ellen appears. I’m so excited she’s promoting design, but I was also impressed that she was so supportive of us.

AE: There are people like myself who up until last season of the show, had no clue what furniture design was like. What is it like knowing that this is a way for people to really learn about and understand furniture design?

VB: I don’t know if I can really answer that accurately. I think right now it’s too soon to tell so I would just be guessing. It’s quite a thing to open up and show your process because it is more of a private experience. I had to really be more open and just be myself on such a larger scale.

AE: So what would you say has been your greatest accomplishment so far as a designer?

VB: I was talking to my wife a few days ago, and she asked me how long I have actually been in business, and I realized it’s been 10 years. She said I should really make a bigger deal of that, and I think she is so right. To be able to still be doing something I love after 10 years in the arts, that’s really my greatest accomplishment. A lot of times I will tell my interns they are working very, very hard to get to keep doing this, and I think that’s true for a lot of creative fields. You keep working hard not for the money or the notoriety, but really for the privilege to get to do it again tomorrow.

AE: A lot of people don’t have the option to get to do what they love every single day. What would be your advice to them in order to achieve that?

VB: I think it has more to do with hard work than anything else. I know that’s kind of a boring answer, but it’s sort of the truth. When you get to a point when you think, “Wow, I am working as hard as I can,” you find out that you can work harder, you can work smarter, you can be more focused, and you can be more creative. So it’s this combination of always working hard and working creatively at the same time.

Ellen’s Design Challenge airs Monday nights on HGTV. Follow Vivian Beer on Twitter: @vivianbeer.

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button