Strat Coffman

Trained as an architect, Strat Coffman’s work explores the concept of “the embodied subject as an agitator of design,” in the designer’s own words. Currently located in both Ann Arbor and Los Angeles, Coffman’s practice incorporates installation, set pieces, guerrilla performance, and wearable garments. Their provocative objects and installations engage the live body, often tactilely, in new orientations toward systems of design such as building codes and generic products, inviting, in Coffman’s words, “misinterpretation, readjustment, and misuse.” 

Recent projects include:

• Erotica Generica, an installation composed of resituated commercial building fixtures designed to invite anonymous contact
• Poly Pockets, with Aaron Powers, a collection of objects made from modified plastic tent materials that explores new uses of the street in response to the pandemic 
• Bagging, a collection of textile garments modeled after conventional building elements made to be worn by multiple bodies at once through adjustable features such as zippers, drawstrings, and velcro 

Strat Coffman holds a bachelor of arts from Wesleyan University and a MArch from MIT, where they won the Imre Halasz Thesis Prize and the AIA Henry Adams Medal and Certificate of Merit at the Department of Architecture. They are a 2022-2024 Architecture Fellow at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. 

Coffman’s work has been exhibited at the Goethe Institut in Boston, University College London, and the List Visual Arts Center at MIT.

Learn more about Strat Coffman

• A Record of My Porous Body, Paprika
• Three Degrees of Squeeze, Log 41, Special Section: Working Queer