The pair, who met as painting students at Rhode Island School of Design, first teamed up to create potpourri. “It had a similar ethos in that we were reclaiming material that was going into the waste stream,” says Martinez Cohen. Research into more monumental mediums led them to terrazzo, an age-old composite made by embedding chips of stone or glass into mortar—a more permanent potpourri, if you will.
Today, their nonhierarchical approach yields many forms, including functional benches and tables. But their artworks all start as drawings, which the duo then adapts into a scaffolding of metal strips that they fill with dye, concrete, and aggregate before polishing the overall slab. With AD100 designer Adam Charlap Hyman, Ficus Interfaith has created everything from a dining table inspired by a client’s beehive to a figurative floor fit for the Seagram Building. “Their work makes a lot of sense in an architectural context,” says Charlap Hyman, who praises the “open mind and genuine enthusiasm” they bring to such commissions.
Currently, Martinez Cohen and Bush are making a 60-foot-long mural for a Staten Island school that was demolished and rebuilt, incorporating rubble from the site’s original tile and marble windowsills. Meanwhile, they dream of leaving their mark on urban infrastructure, a subway platform perhaps. “Originally our goal was to make terrazzo of diamonds and rubies and meteorites and things like that,” says Bush, who cites the influence of jewel-encrusted Fabergé eggs. “But now we feel a responsibility to the more irregular materials—the rejects or the waste.”
Ficus Interfaith’s studio is featured in AD’s May issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.