Thomas Hucker featured at New York gallery

The Pritam & Eames Gallery introduced new work by Thomas Hucker at an exhibit held Aug. 10 through Sept. 18. The featured pieces included a settee, a foyer table, a pair of ebony upholstered chairs and a low table, as well as a presentation of the artist’s drawings.

Highly regarded as both an artist and a craftsman, Hucker’s work is deeply influenced by traditional Japanese aesthetics and contemporary Italian design thinking.

“His furniture combines qualities that are seemingly incompatible — buoyancy and mass, abstraction and utility, richness and plainness,” gallery partner Bebe Johnson said in a statement. “As such, he never fails to come up with sophisticated, engaging work.”

While he was a teenager in Pennsylvania, Hucker began a two-year apprenticeship with German master cabinetmaker Leonard Hilger. He continued his training in furniture making with Jere Osgood at Boston University’s artisanry program in the 1970s. These artists provided Hucker with a strong technical base that paved the way for provocative and conceptually engaging work that he is known for today, according to the gallery.

Hucker has taught at New York’s Pratt Institute and New York School of Design, California College of the Arts in San Francisco and the Appalachian Center for Crafts in Tennessee. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Arts and Design and the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York; Detroit Museum of Art; Los Angeles Country Museum; Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C., and the Smithsonian Institution of American Art in Washington, D.C.

A Taste for Spoons

Through Nov. 4, the Fuller Craft Museum will be hosting an exhibit called “A Taste for Spoons from the Collection of Nora and Norman Stevens.”

The exhibit, which opened Aug. 18, features a collection of works from woodcarvers from around the world who will take a popular everyday tool — the spoon — and create sculptural works of decorative art. The exhibit features 90 of the nearly 900 spoons in the collection.

Started by Norman Stevens in 2005, this distinctive collection of 9” carved wooden spoons has an exciting range of designs from the more traditional spoon shapes of neck and bowl, to spoons shaped like bullfrogs, faces, strawberries, eagles and hearts. The exhibition highlights the various carving techniques, styles and interests of a variety of woodcarvers from almost every U.S. state, several Canadian provinces and 28 countries including Australia, Great Britain, Romania and Sweden.

The collection represents a wide spectrum of wood species such as ash, English boxwood, lilac, mesquite, persimmon, plum, sycamore and many unusual woods. It also includes some longtime carvers who specialize in carving functional spoons as well as other well-known makers who do not specialize in spoons including: Michael Cullen, Mark Gardner, Dewey Garrett, Louise Hibbert, Peter Petrochko, Jamie Russell, Betty Scarpino, Mark Sfirri, Holly Tornheim and Jacques Vesery.

Contacts

Fuller Craft Museum, 455 Oak St., Brockton, MA 02301. Tel: 508-588-6000. www.fullercraft.org

Pritam & Eames, 29 Race Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937. Tel: 631-324-7111. www.pritameames.com

This article originally appeared in the October 2012 issue.