A century has passed since the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts transformed Paris in 1925, establishing Art Deco as a defining global movement. While the style had emerged earlier, this glittering showcase gave it coherence and momentum, introducing the world to sharp geometry, sleek symmetry, and a revolutionary vision of modern luxury that replaced the heavy ornamentation of the 19th century with elegance, speed, and shine.

This centennial year has sparked a wave of tributes across the world's most stylish capitals. Paris's Musée des Arts Décoratifs presents "1925-2025: One Hundred Years of Art Deco," running through April 2026, while Louis Vuitton has revisited its historic role in the movement with an immersive exhibition of more than 300 heritage objects at LV Dream, continuing through 2026. In the United States, the Sarasota Art Museum showcases "Art Deco: The Golden Age of Illustration," and Miami's Art Deco Museum joins Mumbai's Bhau Daji Lad Museum for "Art Deco Alive!"—a twin-city celebration highlighting some of the world's most beautifully preserved Deco architecture.

These exhibitions reaffirm Art Deco's enduring legacy as a language of glamour and innovation. In that spirit, eleven contemporary artists are channeling the style's geometric rigor, bold contrasts, and stylized elegance, carrying its spirit forward into the 21st century.

Jim Gaylord, born in 1974 in Washington, North Carolina, and now based in New York City, has built a distinguished practice over two decades with strong institutional recognition. His recent solo exhibitions across the United States include shows at Deanna Evans Projects, the University of Pennsylvania, and most recently "Chiaroscuro" at Sperone Westwater, his representing gallery. Working with X-Acto knives and glue, Gaylord creates meticulous paper cutouts that balance ancient symbolism with futuristic design, echoing Art Deco's fascination with both history and progress. "I want them to possess a kind of structural integrity and occupy space in a convincing way," Gaylord explained. In works like "Excellent Crest" (2024) and "Fortunate Orbit" (2025), stacked planes of paper create both organic movement and engineered order, channeling timeless motifs—an eye, a flame, a snake—that evoke ancient iconography and contemporary branding alike.

Gaylord recognizes how ornament frequently draws from the natural world, noting that "symmetry, fractals, pattern, and repetition reveal a sense of order and logic in plants, animals and minerals." Like Art Deco designers who stylized feathers, waves, and sunbursts into geometric decoration, he translates organic rhythms into abstraction. Inspired by structures like New York's General Electric Building from 1931, his cutouts incorporate decoration and architecture, history and speculation. While delicate paper remains central to his practice, Gaylord is experimenting with 3D scanning in recent works such as "Orb" (2025), expanding his aesthetic into stone, metal, or resin. His works are held in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Edgar Orlaineta, born in Mexico City in 1972, has exhibited his playful hybrid sculptures across the Americas, Europe, and Dubai, from his 2024 solo exhibition "Modern Mystic" at Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City to "What We See of Things is the Things" at Carbon 12 in Dubai. Professing a deep love for design and its history, Orlaineta approaches Art Deco with both admiration and critique, drawing inspiration from Edward Wadsworth, Gerrit Rietveld, and Pierre Legrain while using techniques from both mass production and handcraft to explore tensions between industrial and handmade processes.

In "Miss Expanding Universe" (2022)—an homage to designer Isamu Noguchi and his ballerina muse Ruth Page—Orlaineta's use of brass, glass, walnut, quartzite, and steel evokes Deco's material luxury, curved lines, and polished surfaces. "I think of geometry as a grid that lets images, texts, and ideas hang together," he explained. His "Wonderwall" (2020) combines locally-sourced recycled woods rooted in Mexican craft traditions—including bocote, chicozapote, purpleheart, and cedar—with imported species like walnut and beech, juxtaposing Central American craftsmanship with European modernist materials. "By combining mass-produced items with crafted elements and natural materials, I try to create sculptures that reflect modernism's formal clarity while exposing its contradictions," he said. Orlaineta is preparing for his upcoming exhibition "The Pataphysic Craftsman" at Swivel Gallery, opening November 13.

Edie Fake, born in 1980 in Evanston, Illinois, and now living in Twentynine Palms, California, is known for both intimate works on paper and ambitious public projects, including large-scale murals in Los Angeles and Chicago. Represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Broadway Gallery in New York, Fake has held exhibitions at major venues such as the Berkeley Art Museum and The Drawing Center. Inspired by Art Deco's visual language, he reimagines the movement's ornamental precision as a framework for emotion and transformation. "I love working with symmetry and am always drawn to it," he explained, "but my instinct is often to interrupt pure symmetry—to make things symmetrical up to a point and then throw something different into the composition."

This tension animates his screenprint "The Processing Department" (2017), where mirrored axes, rhythmic linework, and layered ornament recall Deco's structural harmony while being subtly unsettled through color and line breaks. Inspired by Chicago's Motor Club Building from 1929, Fake transforms Deco's elegance into a meditation on resilience, adaptation, and emotional space. "Art Deco's modernity is now tethered to history and the winding paths of building use," he noted. "While it's incredible to see a building in a preserved state, it's also wonderful to see it get woven into a patchwork of style."

Ji Young Yoon, born in Seoul in 1985 and now based in Jersey City, New Jersey, is an emerging San Francisco-based painter who transforms cityscapes into dreamy abstract paintings of illumination, shadow, and geometry. Her admiration for Art Deco is both personal and aesthetic, recalling her captivation with her hometown's 140 New Montgomery building—a landmark West Coast Deco skyscraper celebrated for its setbacks and dramatic shadow play. She particularly noticed its step-like forms and vertical rhythm, qualities that continue shaping her compositions. "I simplify urban landscapes into geometric shapes in relation to the light source that creates shadows and reflections, and I dress them with vibrant colors," she explained.

In her ongoing series "Illuminated Geometrics," currently exhibited online as part of the group show "Common Ground" with PXP Contemporary, Yoon channels architecture's crisp clarity into radiant paintings that extend Deco's legacy of symmetry and stylized modernity. By distilling buildings into sharp geometries animated by glow and reflection, she echoes Deco's celebration of proportion and ornament while reimagining it for a contemporary world.

Lily Stockman, born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1982 and now based in Los Angeles, first encountered Art Deco while living in Jaipur, India, studying traditional pigments and painting—an experience that informed her understanding of light and color. Traveling through the Thar Desert, she was struck by the faded havelis of the Mandawa region, trading houses from the 1940s and 50s that fused local craft with continental design. "Mandawa is filled with crumbling Art Deco havelis untouched since they were abandoned," she said, "but the crown jewel of Indo Deco design is Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur." Later, Los Angeles's old Art Deco cinemas added to her sense of geometry, symmetry, and rhythm.

Though her palette and brushwork have since loosened, Stockman still sees those structures as the fundamental scaffolding of her compositions—serene planes of color poised between discipline and sensuality. In her recent solo show "Book of Hours" at Charles Moffett, her fourth with the gallery, she explored questions of space and time through meditative, richly colored abstractions inspired by devotional manuscripts. A highlight, "Athenian Spring" (2025), combines geometric abstraction with a flower in bloom, featuring a central biomorphic form gently pulsing against a radiant mint-green background. Stockman has exhibited with Gagosian, Almine Rech, and MASSIMODECARLO, and will present her second solo exhibition at the latter gallery's Hong Kong location in spring 2026.

Masaaki Yonemoto, born in Yamaguchi, Japan in 1987, creates radiant sculptures that echo Art Deco's skyscraper dreams through towers of geometry and brilliance that once symbolized modern cities' future. Recently exhibited at the Armory Show 2025 by his representing gallery, A Lighthouse Called Kanata, his work embodies childhood memories of urban futurism. "The image of New York's skyscrapers, a symbol of Art Deco, was deeply etched in my mind as a boyhood dream of a futuristic city," he explained. His long-running "Skyscraper" series channels Deco's fascination with vertical lines, symmetry, and modern materials through his own Zen-inflected minimalism.

Working with glass and mirrors, Yonemoto creates glinting aquamarine objects that twist and shimmer, drawing inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright's organic architecture and René Lalique's elegant jewelry and glass works. Though still emerging on the art scene, Yonemoto has been recognized for his glass mastery, graduating top of his class in Glass Sculpture at Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts with the school's Headmaster Award. "Light brutally exposes minute irregularities—so it is essential to use the finest techniques and to never forget awe for nature and materials," he noted. By stripping away excess to reveal his materials' essence, his sculptures become meditations on illumination and form.

Rico Gatson, born in Augusta, Georgia in 1966 and living in Queens while working in Brooklyn, has brought his language of radiant color and geometry into galleries, museums, and public spaces from Harlem to Penn Station. Represented by Miles McEnery Gallery, he has channeled memory, transcendence, and identity into visually striking and historically grounded works for thirty years. At the Studio Museum in Harlem, his exhibition "Icons 2007-2017" honored Black cultural and political figures, surrounding their portraits with rays of vivid, contrasting color suggesting both halos and explosive energy fields.

"Geometry in my work is a symbolic language—circles, triangles, fractals, and mathematical patterns carry memory, connecting history, spirituality, politics, and identity," Gatson explained. In "Harriet 4" (2017), he collages abolitionist Harriet Tubman's portrait with painted radiating stripes echoing both sacred auras and Art Deco's sunburst motifs. Similarly, "Untitled (Megastar)" (2025) translates that celestial energy into pure abstraction, its concentric rays recalling Deco's fascination with light, symmetry, and spirit. Gatson cites pioneering dancer Josephine Baker's cosmopolitan vitality and the Chrysler Building as 1920s inspirations for his blurring of boundaries between art, architecture, and performance.

Glendalys Medina, born in Puerto Rico in 1979 and based in New York City, explains that "geometry is my entry point into reality." What might appear ornamental, she adds, "is not decorating; I'm declaring, positioning pattern as a statement of presence and heritage" in mixed-media works. A Nuyorican artist, Medina combines nails, wire, thread, and paint to construct textured, lyrical compositions merging drawing, sculpture, and painting. She is developing major projects including commissions for the Bronx Museum's exhibition "We Are Family" (2026) and a public artwork for Walter Gladwin Park (2028).

In "Atabey" (2022-23), a major commission for El Museo del Barrio, Medina formed a radiant image from gold-hammered nails and thread, drawing on petroglyphs from a ceremonial site in Puerto Rico. The circular embellishment crowning the figure echoes hip-hop aesthetics, recalling stylized boombox speakers. The radiant gold evokes Taíno reverence for guanín—a sacred metal associated with divine energy—while also recalling Art Deco's metallic opulence and geometric precision.

Sofia Pashaei, born in Sweden in 1989 and based in Brussels, Belgium, creates meticulously composed figures recalling Tamara de Lempicka's portraits—the Polish-born painter whose sleek, stylized depictions of women epitomized Art Deco glamour and modern femininity. Yet Pashaei transforms that elegance into a meditation on memory and migration, with subjects emerging from lived exchanges between cultures. "Growing up in Sweden gave me a sense of restraint and balance, while my Iranian heritage, especially Qajar portraiture, introduced me to flatness, stylized figures, and the drama of symmetry," she explained.

"Carried Through Us" (2025) exemplifies this synthesis, using muted tones and measured geometry against a Persian Blue background—a recurring hue linking her works across time with her ancestors. Where Art Deco once borrowed from Persian and Islamic design, Pashaei reclaims those motifs as inheritance, melding lineage, discipline, and emotion into a diasporic language redefining Deco's legacy. An emerging painter who also works as an animation director, Pashaei has presented exhibitions at Ballon Rouge in Brussels and participated in New York group shows at Hashimoto Contemporary and The Hole, with another solo show planned at Rafael Pérez Hernando.

Koak, born in Lansing, Michigan in 1981 and based in San Francisco, renders interior life visible through sinuous forms and expressive gestures, distilling figuration into fluid lines. Using a restrained palette rooted in primary hues, the artist works across painting, drawing, and sculpture. Represented by Perrotin (New York), Altman Siegel (San Francisco), and Union Pacific (London), Koak cites admiration for Erté—the Russian-born French illustrator and stage designer often called the Father of Art Deco, whose work epitomized the movement's elegance and theatrical vitality. "Each [work] feels animated by a current of life that extends through the limbs, into the fingertips, and beyond the body, as if that vitality continues into the surrounding space," she said.

Koak's work nods to this poise and stylization while transforming Art Deco's refinement into a language of vulnerability and emotional depth. In "The Barricade" (2024), a silhouette composed of thick, curving lines holds a child-like figure, surrounded by motifs—an undulating curtain, raindrops, a looping tornado, and lightning bolt—forming a delicate structure of protection and exposure. Informed by philosophical theories of comic art, Koak explores how the smallest artistic gesture can alter meaning, using aesthetic ornamentation to meld her figures into their environments.

Eamon Ore-Giron, born in Tucson, Arizona in 1973 and based in Los Angeles, fuses geometry and vivid color compositions evoking both symmetry and rupture. "I don't like when things are too zipped-up and perfect," Ore-Giron noted, favoring arrangements that leave space for viewers' imagination. His monumental "Infinite Regress" series (2015-present) comprises precise, pulsating constellations of circles, arcs and stepped forms executed in flashe paint and mineral pigments on raw linen, creating complex configurations evoking cosmic, biomorphic and mythological forms.

Expanding beyond painting, Ore-Giron has developed ongoing collaborations with Mexican artisans to produce large-scale tile mosaics, such as "Talking Shit with Viracocha's Rainbow (variation III)" (2024), created with Cerámica Suro and based on a painting shown in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Drawing on Latin American design traditions and Indigenous artifacts like Incan gold nose rings and Peruvian weavings, Ore-Giron sees his practice in conversation with Art Deco's global eclecticism. "In order to forge this new Art Deco style, it was important to look back at a global past for inspiration," he explained, reimagining modernism through a contemporary, decolonial lens. Represented by James Cohan Gallery, with major museum exhibitions including shows at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art and The Contemporary Austin, his upcoming solo exhibition at James Cohan Gallery opens in early November.