A blue and purple ombre puzzle.
Courtesy Areaware

A Renaissance of Artful Puzzle-Making

By Aileen Kwun
April 4, 2020
2 minute read

So you’ve made it through your Netflix queue while scrolling through your Instagram feed, wondering why you spent all that time watching Tiger King—it’s probably time to step away from the screen (any of them). May we suggest: an idle afternoon with a jigsaw puzzle, the latest trending adult pastime, especially now that self-quarantining means that a lot of us have a bit of extra time on our hands. Call it the next slime or coloring book craze. In reality, the social media fixation on this purely analog activity has been building for some time, embraced for its slow and methodical meditative nature that’s said to help relieve anxiety and build short-term memory skills.

Luckily, this has led to a renaissance of aesthetically pleasing puzzles: The now-infamous gradient puzzle from Areaware is deceivingly harder than it seems, and the design brand also sells a series of smaller food-shaped puzzles, as well as a trio featuring graphic, eye-popping patterns by Dusen Dusen. Now’s also a great time for supporting museums—which are taking a big hit from the ongoing Covid-19 closures—by purchasing a few puzzles of your canonical art-history favorites, like the famous “Unicorn in Captivity” tapestry and Hokusai’s “Great Wave” from the Metropolitan Museum of Art or works by Frank Stella and Keith Haring from the MoMA Store. The Clyfford Still Museum in Denver also carries this artful composition puzzle by Sam’s Garage, which includes hand-cut wooden pieces in varying colors that can be mixed and matched according to your own colorful, Abstract Expressionist arrangement.