Studio Furniture: The Next Generation

The Minneapolis College of Art and Design is pleased to be the first venue for the traveling exhibition “Studio Furniture: The Next Generation.” Organized and curated by Dean Wilson, chair of the Furniture Design program at MCAD, the show brings together fifteen outstanding studio furniture artists whose work exemplifies new trends in a greatly expanding field. While these young designers build upon the hallmarks of the studio furniture tradition—high-quality craftsmanship, good design, sculptural emphasis, and limited production—their experimental use of materials and innovative concepts encourages viewers to reconsider their relationships with everyday objects. Familiar but unconventional, the chairs, tables, benches, shelves, and cabinets included in this exhibition will be as thought-provoking as they are visually engaging.

The young furniture designers included in this show are all recent graduates from the most noted furniture programs across the United States: Tanya Aguiñiga (Rhode Island School of Design), Jennifer Anderson (San Diego State University), Isaac Arms (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Vivian Beer (Cranbrook Academy of Art), Katie Hudnall (Virginia Commonwealth University), Yuri Kobayashi (San Diego State University), Timothy Maddox (Kendall College of Art and Design), George Mahoney (Minneapolis College of Art and Design), Bob Marsh (San Diego State University), Heath Matysek-Snyder (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Ryan McNew (Herron School of Art and Design), Daniel Michalik (Rhode Island School of Design), Todd Partridge (San Diego State University), Sylvie Rosenthal (Rochester Institute of Technology), and Jason Schneider (San Diego State University).

In addition to highlighting the work of exhibition participants, the fully illustrated exhibition catalog features an essay by Edward Cooke Jr., professor of American Decorative Arts at Yale University, whose scholarship has helped define the studio furniture movement over the past twenty years.

Wendell Castle, one of the esteemed pioneers of the studio furniture movement, will highlight the generational dimensions of the growing field in a public lecture on Friday, January 29 at 6:30 p.m. Castle’s innovative sculptural furniture has been collected by major museums over the past 40 years, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

After leaving MCAD the exhibition will travel to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in March and to the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis in April.

This exhibition is made possible thanks to a generous donation by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.

From the Star Tribune: Form follows imagination