For Kevin Walz, it’s all coming down to the wire.

He’s one of six designers invited by ILEX to participate in a new and sophisticated collection of lighting – along with Michael Graves, Laura Kirar, Christopher Poehleman, Mick Ricereto, and Michael Wolk.

ILEX will launch their designs, called The Portfolio, on Friday, May 16 at WantedDesign in Gallery 14 during New York’s NYCxDESIGN.

The only drawback is that producing Walz’s design is a nail-biter of a process – and it’s still in fabrication.

“It was the most complicated,” he says. “Ninety percent of the fixture’s finished – but it will look great.”

The artist turned award-winning interior designer started by considering light quality, with highly reflective, diffused light for a fixture that can be installed on either ceiling or wall. He chose mercury glass as its medium.

“It’s a big, convex, spherical form with bulb sitting inside it, hidden by a spherical baffle,” he says. “It lights up into convex sphere and disperses light over a very wide arc.”

Founded in 2000, ILEX is an American lighting manufacturer based in Taunton, Mass. that creates architectural lighting solutions for commercial, hospitality and high-end residential spaces, and for custom projects.

“They approached me last summer, and said we’ve got a company of great artisans and fabricators in our shop outside of Boston, and we refuse to move our manufacturing out of the country,” he said. “They said they wanted to do it in the U.S., and work with designers and have lighting that’s made in America. So I said yes.”

A recipient of the Rome Prize in 1994, he’d moved his family to the eternal city then and stayed there for 17 years. “I thought: why would I ever go back?” he says.

But now he’s at home in the states, designing lighting and teaching at Pratt, his alma mater.

And breathlessly waiting for his newest design to make its debut at NYCxDESIGN.

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