Toolish Behavior: On the Humanity of Tools at New York University’s 370 Jay Street building

By RUICHAO JIANG September 29, 2025

Humans use tools! Anthropologists have long argued that the use of tools was an important step in the evolution of humankind.1 Toolmaking and tool use have long been integral to humanity, so deeply woven into our existence that we often take them for granted. In the art world as well, exhibitions rarely foreground tools. Tools are too common, too ubiquitous: viewers assume that behind every artwork lies a hidden arsenal of implements but rarely pause to ask whether the ways we make and use tools carry a particular meaning.

At Clive Davis Gallery, however, Toolish Behavior does exactly that. Bringing together twelve artists and the tools they invented to make their works; the exhibition refuses to relegate tools to the background. Instead, tools are displayed alongside artworks as equally weighted presences, revealing the “toolish behavior” that underpins creative practice.

Curator shuang cai has long been fascinated by forms of labor that are usually considered too self-evident to warrant attention. In a previous exhibition, Labels? Labels! TBD, they highlighted the role of labels, those seemingly secondary, even invisible elements of an exhibition that usually appear last. With Toolish Behavior, their focus shifts from the margins to the middle of the artistic practice: the relationship between artists and their toolish behavior. Behind these customized tools lie hours of back-and-forth problem-solving, the detours of imagination, and the frustrations of trial and error. These tools testify not only to the outcome of a work but also to the fragile, contingent process that leads from concept to result. What could be more exhilarating than this exposure of making itself?

Arriving at the gallery, located on the ground floor of New York University’s 370 Jay Street building, I was immediately struck by the presence of these unconventional, non-standard, highly customized objects. Each tool carried visible traces of its making: an improvised solution, a form cobbled together, a handle adjusted to the maker’s particular grip. Their presence pulled me away from the present moment, toward deeper reflections on the long history of human life.

A tool, as the definition goes, is an object that extends our ability to shape the environment or accomplish a task.2 Before the Industrial Revolution, tools were the intimate products of individual or small-group craft; after the rise of mass production, tools became standardized, universalized, and detached from personal authorship. The very notion of standardization has since extended beyond material production to shape digital tools and application design. Today we live in a world saturated by standard parts and standardized formats: screws and bolts measured in interchangeable sizes, paper cut to uniform dimensions, image-editing apps offering the same presets for skin tones and filters. Human life itself is increasingly structured by standardized units, producing a world of repetitions and likenesses.

Standardization has obvious benefits. It improves efficiency, reduces costs, ensures consistency, and enables large-scale collaboration.3 Its logic aligns seamlessly with the imperatives of capitalism: faster, cheaper, more uniform, more scalable. Yet it is far from neutral. Standardization also consolidates power, naturalizes conformity, and marginalizes practices that fall outside its norms.3 In this system, people themselves are transformed into units of data—observed, measured, recorded, and fed into designs for more tools, more products, more systems of capture. What disappears in this process is the unruly, messy, unstandardizable dimension of human life itself.

To deviate from the standard, then, is costly. It requires more effort, more problem-solving, more negotiation with uncertainty. It produces messiness, awkwardness, and struggle. But it is precisely in these zones of difficulty that creativity takes root. The twelve artists in Toolish Behavior crafted tools that refuse the frictionless surface of the standardized. Their works stage a quiet but powerful resistance to the homogenizing conditions of modern life. And it reminds us that to make a tool is not only to solve a problem—it is to assert the possibility of other ways of living, other ways of making, other ways of being human.

In these works of Toolish Behavior, the artists speak to something more intimate: the ways in which tools emerge to solve needs that are personal, marginal, or simply overlooked by the logic of the standard. Sometimes these needs are born of exclusion, when existing tools fail to account for particular bodies. Sometimes they arise from the idiosyncratic demands of practice itself. In either case, the tool becomes an extension of body and thought, a prosthesis of creativity.

 Andrew Samuel Harrison, Disabling Addition 1, 2024, Mixed media sculpture, Disabling Addition 2, 2024, Mixed media sculpture, Modified Work Gloves, 2023, Photographer Yufeng Zhao, Courtesy of curator

When I encountered Andrew Samuel Harrison’s work, I felt this truth most viscerally. As someone who lives with prosthesis disability due to neonatal surgeries, he found that no commercially available work glove could fit his particular hand. However, as a sculptor handling steel, concrete, and wood—materials that cut, bruise, and burn—the protection of his hands was nothing short of essential. His self-made glove became an extension of his own capacity to work, enabling the construction of sculptures that themselves meditate on bodily additions and adaptations. Displayed beside his glove are Disabling Addition 1 and Disabling Addition 2, works that probe where tools end and bodies begin, asking us to reconsider what counts as a prosthesis, a supplement, or an extension. Julia Margaret Lu, by contrast, adapted a standard EMT bender into a unique device for fabricating specialized supports for her sculptures, extending the force of her body into the stubbornness of metal. 

 
Graham Burns, Hardware Gradient no. 11, 2023, Multimedia wall piece, Mechanical Arm, 2023, Lamp arm, handheld electrical drill, Photographer Yufeng Zhao, Courtesy of curator

In Graham Burns’s Hardware Gradient series, a custom-built mechanical arm, assembled from a lamp arm and a handheld drill, evokes the speculative aesthetics of exoskeletons in science fiction. The contraption translates an algorithm of his own devising into the embodied act of drilling screws into a grid. Here, the tool functions as a cyborgian appendage, a way for the human body to execute the logic of code. 

 Lily Crandall, Crochet Pattern, 2025, Custom design made in Google Sheets, Fish Animation Frames, 2025, Crochet acrylic yarn, Photographer Yufeng Zhao, Courtesy of curator

Lily Crandall turned to Google Sheets, transforming a familiar spreadsheet into an unlikely design tool to generate crochet patterns. And Shelby Wilson developed a web application that assists bead weaving by offloading tedious calculations, freeing the imagination to move more fluidly. In each case, the tool embodies the hinge between mind and material, alleviating burdens, extending capacities, or simply rechanneling energy toward invention.

 Lu Lyu, Engagement, 2025, CNC-milled wood, acrylic, Photographer Yufeng Zhao, Courtesy of curator

At other times, tool-making arises in response to questions that are unconventional, even eccentric. These problems often originate in the artist’s concept, appearing in forms that are non-standard, idiosyncratic, even impractical. In such cases, the tool becomes an invented, experimental solution. Lu Lyu’s Engagement reflects on her parents’ relationship, likening it to two differently shaped gears that, through years of mutual negotiation, grind against one another until they eventually fit. To realize this metaphor, she had to design a pair of irregular gears that both mesh perfectly and represent her parents’ bodies. For this purpose, she created a custom Grasshopper plugin: a software tool for a problem no one else would have thought to solve. Similarly, Yufeng Zhao, for his project on the infinitely extended coastline, built a Horizon Labeling Tool that allows him to drag and mark coastlines across thousands of images, an otherwise impossible task without such an invention. 

wei, Untitled (mold, 3DP, round), 2025, PLA, silicone, modular casting system, Photographer Yufeng Zhao, Courtesy of curator