Dustin Black turns home craft into a creative advantage at Meerkat

By Priya Raman

Dustin Black's felt sculptures run to 5 feet, and he makes every one in a 25-square-foot home office on nights and weekends.

The career art director recently became chief creative officer and partner at Meerkat, the full-service Minneapolis creative agency formerly known as Preston Spire. His practice started in 2020, when the pandemic stalled agency work and left him at home with his twin daughters, who were 6 years old.

How a family banner turned into a business

Black had planned to turn the family mantra — "Be brave, be curious, be kind" — into a large banner for the house. He used felt from New York-based manufacturer Oxford Pennant and shared the finished banner with the company. "Oxford Pennant just absolutely loved it," he said.

Oxford Pennant then began producing a pennant from Black's design and offered him a supply of felt for future projects.

A second sponsor followed. Cricut, an at-home cutting machine maker, took interest in the banner and offered to sponsor a 5-foot fish he had already begun sculpting from foam. "I had to figure out, what would a felt fish look like? I started playing, and I suddenly had my first fish covered in felt scales," he said.

What the sculptures are made of

Black has built more complex scales for the fish, replaced them with felt flowers, then moved on to sculpting birds. The pursuit of new shapes, styles and designs drives him. Every piece starts with elaborate sketches. He determines the size and frames the work in metal, wood and foam.

Cricut cuts the felt. Black glues on each piece and adds paint and other materials. His lessons started with fingerpainting as a toddler and continued through a double major in art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

His daughters join the work so he can "show them it's OK to try something new and fail," he said. They now have their own art projects.

Black also documents each piece on Instagram, including his mistakes and how he moved past them. "I'm trying to put out there the notion that we're all beginners, and we're all figuring it out, and it might look good in the end but it took a lot to get there," he explained.

Where the work has appeared

Black's sculptures have shown in galleries and at events. For the last year, they have appeared at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. "Having them in a public space has been a lot of fun because I get random texts from people: 'Look at what my family group chat is talking about!'" he said.

He has resisted taking commissions that would dictate what he makes or require him to copy his previous work. His latest project, an eagle with hand-painted polymer clay feathers, holds pride of place inside the Meerkat offices.

What does this practice change for creative teams?

Black places a handmade object inside the agency, where clients can see and touch it. With widespread suspicion of AI in creative work, he sees clear value in clients handling a piece made in-house. "We need to be doing new things. We need to be solving complex problems. And we need to use curiosity to approach it," he said.

His answer to AI suspicion is a physical artifact a client can inspect and a process he publishes in full, failures included. As clients question machine-generated creative output, the open test for Meerkat is whether that visible proof of making can travel from the office into client work.