Have a Seat!: Artist Chairs in MAD’s Collection

MAD’s collection features an array of artist- and craftsman-designed seating, from prototypes designed for industrial production to whimsical, one-of-a-kind creations. This module highlights some of the eye-catching and imaginative chairs in the museum’s collection, many of which were made using traditional craft techniques despite possessing an innovative or unexpected appearance. Some of these works diverge from our typical understanding of what seating looks like through visual references to other existing forms, such as Andy Buck’s playful Bench Press or Hiroki Takada’s Tea Ceremony Chair, which resembles an oversized tea whisk. Others—like Frank Tjepkema’s Chair of Textures (Version 1) and Martin Mostböck’s Best Friends Chair—challenge the very function of a chair by making seating an impossible—or at least dangerous—proposition. The Campana Brothers’s Paraíba Chair, constructed entirely of handmade cloth dolls affixed to a stainless steel frame, represents a traditional handicraft being deployed in an innovative way, both in the sense of the chair’s unique appearance and in the benefit it affords to its makers: the name Paraíba is drawn from the coastal state in Brazil where an NGO called OrientVida teamed with Campana to employ local women experiencing poverty to sew the dolls which are then stitched to the chair’s frame. Meanwhile, Wendell Castle’s Long Night chair exemplifies the artist’s continuous engagement with new technologies over the course of his prolific career. After decades of making work using a wide variety of techniques, in 2004 Castle returned to the stack lamination he had innovated through the 1960s, this time incorporating a CNC machine; Long Night was the first mature work that Castle made into an edition using the CNC technology. All of the examples featured here celebrate the creative and original approaches to craft and design that have long been championed by MAD. To continue exploring the museum’s collection of artist chairs, select “Seating” under the Object Name in our collection search.