H
e named his Tumblr site Things Organized Neatly, but that doesn’t mean curator Austin Radcliffe could lay out what was going to follow over the next six years.
It wasn’t long before the photography blog opened doors for Radcliffe, then a student at Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis. Online and traditional media, including BuzzFeed, The Guardian, The New York Times and Time, quickly took notice of his remarkably calming collection of objects arranged in patterns and rows.
He leveraged the site’s rising popularity to introduce himself to artists he admired — connecting with IKEA cookbook photographer Carl Kleiner of Sweden and gaining a New York internship in 2012 with the conceptual sculptor Tom Sachs. Radcliffe returned to New York in 2013, working with a furniture design gallery and doing installations. In 2014, he was invited to speak at the Tate Britain and Tate Modern museums in London.
The Webbys — the Oscars of the Internet — asked Radcliffe to enter their competition, and he ended up as both the Webby Winner and People’s Voice pick for Best Personal Blog in 2015. Publishers also reached out to him, and the book Things Organized Neatly will be released Tuesday. Radcliffe next wants to open an art gallery in Cincinnati, where he’s worked with the Contemporary Arts Center, The Carnegie and Brush Factory and as a DJ since moving here in 2014.
“The Internet is a real thing that can effect actual change,” Radcliffe says, reflecting on his accomplishments at age 29. “That’s what drives me. I really love connecting those dots.”
More than 400,000 Tumblr followers love him for doing so. Yet in April 2010, Radcliffe didn’t know Things Organized Neatly would get as big as it has.
“I started the blog to make some kind of mark on the culture — just see how far I could take it,” he says. He became interested in graphic design and photography while growing up in suburban Dayton, Ohio, where he was design editor of Oakwood High School’s paper. He earned his bachelor’s from Herron in 2012.
Radcliffe posts some of his own photos on Things Organized Neatly, but most of the content is images he’s curated from the web or received from fans worldwide. He had been updating the site almost daily, but the frequency has slowed to about twice a week as Radcliffe works on promoting his book and other projects.
Respecting the minimalism of the photos, Radcliffe limits his commentary while crediting the sources. In an interview, he shares that some of the book’s pictures were taken in Cincinnati with local photographer Brooke Shanesy. Their “Springs Organized Neatly” image plays off the Webbys’ logo and was created to campaign for the People’s Voice vote.
It’s addictive to flip through the book or click through the blog and see everyday objects laid out by size, color, shape or in a grid. There is comfort to be found in familiar items and repetitive patterns, and thousands come to Radcliffe’s meticulous website to refocus and meditate. “This blog is so calming to scroll through. Thanks for running it,” a recent note reads. “Your blog makes me so happy. It’s so soothing,” another visitor writes while leaving a smiley face.
The mantra of Radcliffe’s idol Tom Sachs is “Always be knolling,” referring to a practice of grouping similar objects and arranging them in parallel lines or at right angles. Name a group of things and you’ll find them organized neatly on Radcliffe’s site or in the book — tools, toys, food, clothes, plants, chairs, rocks, papers and scissors. Electronics and musical instruments have been disassembled and the parts sorted into tidy rows. Want to try knolling yourself? The endpapers of the book are blue grid sheets.
The precise and stunning arrangements
definitely tap into whatever latent or overt obsessive-compulsive tendencies we have. Not surprisingly, Radcliffe gets asked a lot if he has OCD himself. He does not. He does, however, have an artist’s eye for matching even disparate styles. Radcliffe arrived for our interview wearing floral Oxford shoes and aqua socks with big black dots. The pairing worked.
Some articles suggest that sites like Things Organized Neatly and bestsellers such as Spark Joy and The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, both by Japanese author Marie Kondo, are responses to the stresses of modern living. But Radcliffe puts his activity into historical context.
In the introduction to his book, he cites cabinets of curiosities from the Renaissance, when scientists and other thinkers created whole rooms devoted to natural history specimens. And in his Tate talks, Radcliffe spoke to teens and twentysomethings about 19th-century salon-style galleries while drawing comparisons to Internet culture and tools like Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook.
“The Tate put together a salon-style display from the museums’ permanent collection — different styles, eras and cultures on one wall. And that’s what the (Internet) has done,” Radcliffe says.
In his five-word Webby acceptance speech, Radcliffe said, “Let me organize your things.”
“I thought it sounded better than ‘A blogger looking for work,’ ” he jokes in our interview. After six years of curating the Things Organized Neatly site and building that brand, Radcliffe says that curating in a gallery or museum is his long goal.
Radcliffe wants to use the Internet to create a gallery connecting Cincinnati and artists from around the world. He and Caroline Turner, a fellow Oakwood alum and a recent graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, have been scouting locations for IRL.gallery — a place that would exist both as a URL and “in real life” (IRL). They hope for a summer launch.
“We want to access a community that’s greater than the local environment and have a broader dialogue of contemporary art,” Turner says. At the same time, she and Radcliffe look forward to bringing attention to Cincinnati and its architecture.
Sounds like a neat thing.
Radcliffe will discuss and sign THINGS ORGANIZED NEATLY at 7 p.m. March 24 at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Norwood. Follow Radcliffe’s blog: thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com.
This article appears in Mar 2-9, 2016.
