Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Sculpture, glasswork, furniture design
Website: rafiajl.com
Rafi Ajl was born in 1983 in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in a deeply artistic household where making and taking apart objects was a way of life; his quilter mother was an early influence on his sense of color and material. He earned a BA in literature and critical theory from Hampshire College in 2005, studying post-structuralist thought, the Situationists, and Walter Benjamin, before beginning a master’s in landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, which he left after a year to return to the Bay Area and work as a landscape designer under Topher Delaney in San Francisco.
Ajl went on to earn an MFA in Design from California College of the Arts in 2012. He spent several years designing and building bicycle frames and later taught frame fabrication and furniture design at CCA and UC Davis. In 2017 he founded The Long Confidence, a Berkeley studio producing handmade furniture and home goods, and began developing a parallel, more experimental sculptural practice under his own name, working across wood, cast metal, and glass.
He now lives and works in Berkeley, California. His solo exhibition Two Bodies opened at The Future Perfect’s San Francisco gallery in 2024, and his work has since appeared in group shows including New in New York and Abundance (2025) and JUGS (2026). Earlier in his career he contributed to collaborative projects exhibited internationally, including the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Shenzhen (2019, with IF/THEN Studio) and MAXXI in Rome (2015, with Future Farmers).
Ajl describes himself as obsessed with form and process, driven by the possibilities of materiality and an insatiable curiosity about how things are made. His Erratics series takes its name from glacial erratics — boulders displaced and redistributed by glacial movement — and translates that idea into sculptural furniture built from wood, sisal, and in-house cast brass and aluminum, with quick, gestural joinery that puts disparate materials into dialogue.
Since 2021 he has also developed Saguaro Works, a body of glass vessels made using an original mold-making process he invented himself; the resulting forms are intentionally thick, dense, and heavy rather than delicate, pushing against conventional expectations of glass as a fragile medium. Across both bodies of work, Ajl treats scrap and remnant material as a starting point for study and play, and his background in critical theory informs an approach that favors open-ended, boundless experimentation over fixed forms.
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