ReBrew at NYCxDESIGNxSouvenir Exhibition

This spring I was honored to be part of NYCxDESIGNxSouvenir Exhibition located at the Canvas 3.0 Gallery in the World Trade Center. This show asked 72 designers to rethink what a souvenir can be. Instead of another postcard or keychain, the exhibition invited us to create objects that capture memory, place, and meaning in new ways.

For me, a souvenir is never just about the object, it’s about the story embedded in it. My piece, ReBrew: The Café Collection, turns something overlooked and considered waste into a way of remembering the city’s rituals.

Using the spent coffee grounds piling up in NYC cafés every day, I developed a coffee-based bio-ink and used it to print textiles that celebrate iconic cafés like Veniero’s Pasticceria, Caffe Reggio, and Porto Rico Importing Co. These cafés aren’t just businesses, they’re community anchors that built NYC's cafe culture

By transforming coffee waste into printable ink, I wanted to show how design can both honor everyday culture and push toward circularity. Coffee is one of the most resource-intensive crops in the world, yet so much of it is discarded. What happens if we start to see that waste as material? What if our souvenirs carried both memory and responsibility?

Being part of NYCXDESIGNxSouvenir let me situate this question within a broader design conversation. Each piece in the exhibition offered its own take on New York, sometimes playful, sometimes political, always personal. I loved seeing how other designers transformed their own experiences of the city into keepsakes.

For me, ReBrew is both an homage to New York’s café culture and a proposal for how we might rethink the things we hold onto. A souvenir doesn’t just remind us where we’ve been, it can shape how we imagine what comes next.

To learn more about my fellow designers, the show's partner, Cool Hunting, the sponsor, Kikkerland Design, and the talented curatorial and exhibition team Boym Partners, See HERE

To learn more about my project rebrew nyc,

See HERE

NYCxDESIGNxSouvenir Exhibition at The Canvas 3.0 Gallery