Maine exhibit features work of school’s alumni

A juried exhibition, “Alumni and Fellows” opened at the Messler Gallery in Rockport, Maine on Jan. 22. The show features 22 pieces of original, contemporary work by alumni of the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship and will be open to the public through April 7.

Jurors were Tib Shaw of St. Paul, Minn., curator at the American Association of Woodturners; Josh Vogel of Kingston, N.Y., a designer, maker and founder of Black Creek Mercantile & Trading Co., and Jeremy Zietz of Oakland, Calif., a principal designer at Steelcase.

Exhibitors include both professional and avocational woodworkers from across the U.S. and beyond who have previously participated in the center’s courses or fellowship program.

Exhibitors include Maine’s Nick Barboza (Hampden); Sam Cotton (Hope); George Partal (Bangor); Julann Troiano (Chamberlain), and Chelsea Witt (Rockport); Massachusett’s Kate Davidson (Milton) and Duncan Gowdy (Holden); North Carolina’s Aspen Golann (Bakersville) and Steve Miller (Black Mountain); New York’s Jamie Herman (Fairport); Anna Hitchcock (Little Compton) and Sergey Levchin (Brooklyn), and Wisconsin’s Alan Kalker and Emma Senft (both from Madison).

Others are Erik Curtis of Philadelphia; Kathleen Kilanowski of San Francisco; Cleveland’s John Scanlan; Owain Harris of Center Barnstead, N.H.; Greg Bruck Bedford, Ohio; Matthew Hedgepath Smith of Austin, Texas; R.D. Johnson in Vienna, Va., and Sayer Houseal, representing the McMurdo Station’s carpentry shop in Antarctica.

For more, visit www.woodschool.org.

The Center for Art in Wood in Philadelphia presents “Tom Loeser: Please, Please, Please” with guest curator Glenn Adamson. The exhibit is a joint venture between the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. It opened Feb. 12 and runs through July 24.

Presenting imaginative furniture and works on paper by Loeser, a Wisconsin-based maker and designer, the exhibit encourages viewers to rethink their assumptions on furniture and the space around us, as well as the way seating and environment can impact personal and social behaviors, according to the center.

“Included work represents 30 years of the artist’s career from colorful, post-modern objects that play with ideas of art and design, to recent furniture experimentations that combine natural-edge slabs of wood with discarded antique tools and interactive stools that can be turned and tumbled. Also included are works on paper that examine the form of the chai,” the center explained.

For more, visit www.centerforartinwood.org. 

This article was originally published in the April 2021 issue.