Join us for an informal chat with and presentation by Laura Mays, co-curator of the exhibition, Making a Seat at the Table, currently on view at The Center for Art in Wood in Philadelphia.
About the curator:
Laura Mays is a woodworker, designer and educator. She is the Director of the Fine Woodworking Program at The Krenov School, Mendocino College in Fort Bragg, CA (formerly the College of the Redwoods). Her work is represented in the National Museum of Ireland, and in private and public collections in the US and Ireland. She has written for Fine Woodworking and Furniture and Cabinetmaking magazines. She is profiled in Good Clean Fun, the recent book by Nick Offerman about woodworking, with a chapter about her work and her role as a teacher. She is the founding president of The Krenov Foundation, a nonprofit organization which supports the craft of woodworking.
About the exhibition:
In the first exhibition of its scope, curators Deirdre Visser and Laura Mays present the breadth of perspectives and practices that North American women and women-identifying woodworkers in the furniture tradition are employing. Making a Seat at the Table—held on the centenary of women’s suffrage in the United States—showcases the profound skill, innovation, and creative vision of these makers. While acknowledging that woodworking has been and remains male-dominated, the exhibition focuses on the many ways these makers are both expanding the edges of the field and holding down the center. An exhibition of objects as well as process, and including long-established as well as emerging craftspeople, Making a Seat at the Table explores both the exquisitely crafted object and the community that is built around it. These makers are deploying their work to change models of education, production, entrepreneurship, distribution, and community-building, positioning craft as a tool to imagine and create a more sustainable, equitable, inclusive future.
Making a Seat at the Table: Women Transform Woodworking presents works by 43 artists and makers from throughout North America:
Jennifer Anderson Teresa Audet Connie Chisholm Vivian Chiu Emma Chorostecki Alex Clarke Kate Davidson Leigh Dotey Heidi Earnshaw Ashley Eriksmoen Bec Evans Annie Evelyn Mollie Ferguson and Heather Trosdahl Gail Fredell Melanie Hamilton BA Harrington Katie Hudnall Erin Irber Laura Kishimoto Yuri Kobayashi Christine Lee Bowen Liu Kristina Madsen Heide Martin Sarah Martin Wendy Maruyama Yvonne Mouser Christy Oates Jodie Prud’homme SIOSI Rosanne Somerson Michaela Crie Stone Tiny WPA Katrina Tompkins Briana Trujillo Hannah Vaughan Sarah Watlington Leslie Webb Folayemi Wilson Kimberly Winkle Kat Wong A Workshop of Our Own and Sarah Marriage Would Works and RH Lee
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