MAWD and Acrylic Collaborate to Create Bespoke Artwork for Fulton Bond

When Elliot March, Co-Founder of MAWD | March and White Design, first met Kyle Suri and the team behind Acrylic at BDNY two years ago, he immediately saw potential in their approach to art. Acrylic  was doing something relatively new: combining artists' creative direction with robotics to produce physical paintings that could be customized in response to an individual project.

For a design studio working across some of the world's most ambitious residential and hospitality developments, that opened up an interesting possibility. What if artwork could be developed with the interior, rather than sourced once the rest of the design had been established?

Acrylic  works at the intersection of art, technology and production. The process begins with a creative concept, developed in collaboration with designers and informed by the character of the project. Artists then translate the final direction into a digital composition, mapping the individual brushstrokes, colors and layers that make up the work.

That information is used to guide the company's robotic painting technology, which recreates the composition physically on canvas using real paint. The artist remains central to the process. Their decisions determine everything from the movement of a brushstroke to the way colors and layers build across the canvas. The technology provides a different way of bringing that work into the physical world, including the ability to produce paintings at a scale and quantity suited to larger projects.

For Elliot, that combination of creative control and flexibility was what made the collaboration compelling. “What interested us was the opportunity to work with the team from the beginning of the process,” he says. “We could establish a direction around the project and then develop the artwork in response to the interiors, rather than simply selecting from what already existed.”

Fulton Bond is a new residential development in Chicago's Fulton Market district, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, with interiors by MAWD. The building takes inspiration from the neighborhood's industrial heritage while introducing a contemporary residential experience shaped around its architecture and location. For MAWD, the interiors establish a warm and layered counterpoint to the building's urban setting, bringing together carefully considered materials, sculptural forms and a rich tonal palette. The artwork developed with Acrylic became part of that wider composition.

MAWD began by sharing the project's creative direction with Kyle and the Acrylic team, establishing the colors, atmosphere and visual references that would inform the work. From there, the process became a conversation between the design team, Acrylic's curators and the artists themselves.

“There was a lot of back and forth, which was important,” Elliot says. “We were looking at the overall theme, the color tones and what we wanted the artwork to contribute to the spaces. The ability to explore different directions before arriving at the final work made it a genuinely collaborative process.”

The resulting pieces are abstract and gestural, with warm, muted tones that connect to the material language of the interiors. Rather than introducing a separate visual identity, the artwork was developed to sit comfortably within the wider scheme while bringing its own texture and character.

Scale was another important part of the conversation. Artwork has a different relationship to a space depending on its setting, whether it is encountered in a more intimate environment or as part of a larger architectural composition. Acrylic's process allowed MAWD to consider those proportions from the outset and develop the work accordingly.

For Kyle, this is where Acrylic can offer something particularly useful to interior designers. Too often, artwork enters a project towards the end of the process, when the architecture, materials and furnishings have already been established. The challenge then becomes finding work that feels appropriate to the space. Acrylic's model creates the opportunity for a different approach.

“The most interesting part of working with a design team is being able to build on their vision,” Kyle says. “The conversation can move beyond simply asking what artwork is available and towards exploring what could be created for a particular project.”

At Fulton Bond, that meant developing the artwork around the project rather than asking the project to accommodate pre-existing work. The flexibility of the process also allowed the teams to maintain a sense of coherence across multiple pieces without making them feel uniform. Each work could relate to the wider palette and creative direction while retaining the texture, movement and variation that comes from painting.

That physical quality was important to both teams. The finished works are not reproductions designed to imitate paintings. They are painted canvases, where layering and brushwork remain visible up close.

“There's something about the depth and texture of a painting that changes the way you experience it,” Kyle says. “The work has a physical presence, and that becomes particularly important when you're designing spaces that people experience in person.”

For MAWD, the collaboration with Acrylic reflects a broader interest in the ways new technologies and methods of making can expand creative possibilities. The value is not in innovation for its own sake. It is in finding tools that allow designers, artists and makers to develop work with greater specificity.

At Fulton Bond, that meant bringing artwork into the design conversation from the beginning and allowing it to develop alongside the interiors. The process brought together MAWD's vision for the project, Acrylic's technology and production capabilities, and the creative direction of the artists behind the work. The result is a collection shaped by the character of Fulton Bond itself.

As Elliot puts it, “The opportunity was to create something that felt genuinely connected to the project. We weren't simply looking for artwork that would work within the interiors. We were able to develop the work with the interiors in mind.”