November 30, 2006 – March 9, 2007
Curator’s Statement by Miguel Gomez-Ibanez and Jonathan Binzen
If there is a pocket of the United States where the art of hand-made furniture is more robust than it is in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, we haven’t seen it. Our ambition for this show was to demonstrate the exceptional vigor and variety of work being done in the top right corner of the country, and the chairs we found have handsomely realized that ambition.
Much of the work being done in the region is of a sort that often goes unacknowledged. A chair designed on commission to suit a particular client may never be seen outside the maker’s shop and the buyer’s home. We wanted to bring some of that work out into the open. The chairs we were drawn to are nearly all made for use rather than for exhibition, but it is in part their success in addressing the issue of function that makes them so worthy of exhibition now.
In our first discussions, as we began to shape the criteria for the show, we briefly considered focusing on chairs of original design. But we soon discovered reproductions and historically inspired chairs that were so beautiful and so interesting that we couldn’t resist them. And in the end, while selecting chairs primarily on the basis of excellence regardless of style, we happened to arrive at a group of chairs that has a balance of period reproductions, contemporary designs, and period-inflected contemporary designs. Similarly, without any jiggering, we found that on the final list of makers, the three states were represented in roughly equal numbers.
We assumed from the start that we would find very good chairs to show, but it has been a delight to discover just how visually strong and technically superb they are. Hats off!
