<p>Softcover book by Nancy Berlinger (Author) , Jr. Edward S. Cooke (Author), it has  160 pages.Publisher: Peabody Essex Museum; 1st edition.</p>

Inspired by China: Contemporary Furnituremakers Explore Chinese Traditions

Arts & Photography

Edward S. Cooke, Jr.

Nancy Berlinger

History & Criticism

Peabody Essex Museum

<p>In 2005, a group of studio furnituremakers from China, Canada, and the United States gathered at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, for a three-day intensive exploration of historical Chinese furniture. Inspired by China documents the exploration that took place during the workshop and demonstrates the provocative results launched in response. This book brings together new work by 22 preeminent North American and Chinese studio furnituremakers in a way that both celebrates each individual's work and looks at the experience of inspiration as a unifying process. Essays provide historical background from both Chinese and American furniture perspectives. Illustrations showcase both historical pieces of Chinese furniture and their contemporary offspring that resulted from the Inspired by China workshop. Ranging from respectful reinterpretations of chairs, stools, and tables to sculptural reimaginings of purpose and structure, these pieces of furniture combine to tell an eloquent story of cross-cultural interchange and community.</p>

Nancy Berliner

Furniture by Wendell Castle

The book reproduces the artist’s most important works, including clocks and trompe l’oeil pieces, in full-color plates, including many details and multiple viewsAlso includes black-and-white illustrations of working drawings by Castle and works by artists who have influenced him as well as other fine artists and architects who have designed furnitureWendell Castle has written, especially for this volume, an essay on commissionsThe last generation has seen the maturation of the Studio Craft movement in America and a dramatic change in furniture making. The trailblazer in both phenomena has been Wendell Castle, an extraordinarily inventive and influential artist whose works as a whole embodies the development of handcrafted furniture as a major art form.He has consistently challenged the traditional concept of wooden furniture design and construction, using wood to create new, highly expressive forms, thus becoming a major catalyst in the emergence of the art-furniture movement over the past thirty years. He has created innovative works that transcend a reverence for material and express a concern for meaning rather than function. His recent breakthrough work goes beyond obvious technical virtuosity and mastery of craft tradition to concentrate on conceptual issues. He has even moved into Post-Modernist architectural forms (although he denies the label), into design, and into painted sculpture.Furniture by Wendell Castle places the artist’s oeuvre within the contexts of both the emerging postwar crafts movement and mainstream American art of the past three decades.

Davira S. Taragin

Joseph Giovannini

Individual Artists

Hudson Hills

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