Curated by Thomas Mellins and Donald Albrecht, the exhibition Art + Furniture: Designers, Makers, and Advocates explores the art and studio furniture movements’ origins, contributions, and legacies in the closing decades of the 20th century. Intentionally blurring the distinction between fine art and useful objects, as well as between design and craft, the artists featured challenged traditional ways of exhibiting and selling work, giving rise to a new generation of gallerists and entrepreneurs. 

They embraced a bold concept of what furniture could be. At the same time, they responded to the city they called home. New York in the late 1970s was a metropolis in crisis. Yet with adversity came a positive edge: avant-garde art, music, fashion, and design flourished. Amidst challenges to modernist “good taste,” many artists and craftspeople flocked to New York’s formerly industrial SoHo neighborhood, attracted to its atmosphere of artistic freedom, as well as to its commodious and comparatively affordable live/workspaces. 

Furniture, related objects, and photographs of twenty artists will be showcased in the exhibition, including Donald Judd, Wendell Castle, Dakota Jackson, and Michele Oka Doner as well as artists less well known to the public but critical to the movements including Elizabeth Browning Jackson, Rafael Barrios, Jim Cole, Thomas Hucker, Laura Johnson Drake, Dan Friedman, James Hong, Alex Locadia, Main + Main, Terence Main, Wendy Maruyama, Howard Meister Forrest Myers and Richard Snyder. 

Image: ’Round the World by Richard Snyder 

Photo credit: Matthew Gordon. Courtesy of Superhouse and Richard Snyder.