Rude Osolnik, Vessel, 1983, spalted maple.
Fuller Craft Museum is excited to present an exhibition of wood art that reveals the scope of its Permanent Collection (with 49 turned, carved, assembled, and repurposed pieces) as well as another 66 pieces selected from friends of Fuller Craft Museum (15 lenders in eight states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Illinois, Maryland, North Carolina, Kentucky). The exhibition includes the first wood object acquisition Totem#2, a 1963 sculpture by Varujan Boghosian, given the year after the Museum’s modernist building was opened in 1969. The most recent wood acquisition, Jamie Russell’s Hobbit’s Chamber Pot, prods the imagination and blurs the imaginary distinction between utilitarian function and form; craft is art.
From the conceptual (Milo Mirobelli’s, Balloon Teapot) to the edible (Fumio Yoshimura’s, Peapod) the exhibition will leave the viewer asking—How did they make that? Teapots and tables, vases and vessels, bowls and benches—the artwork ranges from more functional and everyday objects to tour de force carvings like Livio De Marchi’s brown paper Shopping Bag, and Binh Pho’s Flower in the Dream. There are also works of a playful nature like the wooden hat construction of Kentucky artist Chris Ramsey. Works range in size from Peter Dean’s six and a half-foot-tall floor lamp Pater Noster, to Hans Weissflog’s two inch tall Ball in Square Lens Box. Come see crafted bowls by Alan Stirt; exquisite furniture by George Nakashima, Kristina Madsen, Wendell Castle, and Sam Maloof; and free-standing sculptural works of Mark Lindquist, Robyn Horn, and Stoney Lamar.
We are showing not only turned wood, but also objects that have been made utilizing BOTH turning AND carving processes. The show spotlights a unique bench, the collaboration of furniture artist Kristina Madsen and Makiti Koto, a Fiji master carver with whom she studied.