Furniture art a union of beauty and function

Oakland Tribune, Oct 4, 2003 by Monique Beeler, STAFF WRITER

YOU won't find Maggie Birmingham's embroidered wood table and chairs or Marcia Stuermer's chaise lounge made from street trash on your next visit to IKEA or the Macy's furniture department. You'll find these highly conceptual yet functional pieces instead at the Blue Room Gallery in San Francisco.

Furniture art's usefulness prompts many in the art world to relegate it to

the lower status of craft, a practice Blue Room Executive Director Paul Mahder rejects. In support of fine art created by Birmingham, Stuermer and 21 fellow furniture artists present a rare exhibition of their work in "Bay Area Furniture Art" at Blue Room. The show runs through Oct. 26.

Tour the long, airy main gallery and spot pieces intended for use indoors and out, from a floor lamp ringed with blue glass bottles in place of a traditional shade to an elaborate, wooden folding field desk complete with waterproof copper top and canvas canopy.

"This is the first time we've done art furniture, which I'm really excited about," Executive Director Paul Mahder says. "A lot of these artists might have had one piece (exhibited) in a design center. There's never this

compilation of work" shown at once.

Opened in June 2002, Blue Room Gallery shows every genre by artists new and established, while many of its counterparts in the gallery world limit themselves to one or a small handful of media, Mahder says.

"The artistic thrust is more about passion and a unique voice than it is a particular genre," he says about Blue Room.

In terms of showing furniture art, many privately run galleries don't have enough space to exhibit several large pieces, Mahder says.

More often it's a lack of interest that prevents galleries from presenting furniture art exhibitions, says designer Mark Waldo, who holds a master's degree in architecture from University of California, Berkeley. Waldo curated "Bay Area Furniture Art" with designer and conceptual artist Maria Mortati.

In choosing furniture art to include in the show, curators looked for work that anyone walking into the gallery -- situated in the heart of the multicultural Mission District -- could relate to without benefit of a formal arts background.

"I'm really interested in meaning that's communicated through experience (and) that doesn't require you to be in the 'in crowd' to understand," Waldo says.

Furniture featured in the show meets this criteria, he says.

"It's speaking to the people who are looking at it, and it's doing that at three levels," he observes.

On the design level, the work expresses itself through line, form, shape and how it resonates with viewers. On the conceptual level, each piece asks visitors to think about it in a deeper intellectual way, perhaps drawing on previous art training or an individual's earlier encounters with artwork.

Ultimately, Waldo says, he wants each piece to provoke questions about how the furniture would be used and what it would say about the user.

He points out Stuermer's resin-and-trash chaise, embedded with a crushed Starbucks cup, a Raisinet's box top, a wrinkled Cheetos bag and an unopened condom package, among other refuse.

"What do we imagine is being said about us by sitting on this?" Waldo says. "What does it mean that there's trash (inside)?"

Oakland artists Jef de Buyzer and Eileen Kennedy explore how people interact with furniture in their first collaborative piece, "Daydream/Big Sky." Designed as a coffee table-type structure, the work resembles an oblong bench with a hollow center. The surface has been covered in pale blue linoleum; sheepskin lines the inside space. The designers say they want the piece to stimulate conversation about how it's appropriate to act around furniture and whether it's appropriate to stroke the piece's soft inside.

For artists who make furniture art, the process often becomes an obsession, gallery director Mahder says.

"For example, this is a really cool piece," he says, pulling out a small segment of Maiko Sugano's "Tree," a sleek, towering pole-like construction of cypress and alder. "Each (segment) has these little drawers."

"It took her a year to do this and it's gorgeous," he says.

Sugano is a student at California College of the Arts, which has campuses in Oakland and San Francisco. Established artists in the show include Fred Bould of East Palo Alto-based Bould Design, a product development studio. Pieces by Bould, who has taught at CCA and Stanford University, are included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

For the exhibition, Bould displays three "Aura" lamps in clear gray, blue or amber acrylic he designed with Pablo Pardo. The cone- shaped receptacles feature an opaque top half through which a single bulb beams a halo of soft light.

Bould's lamps represents some of the few pieces displayed which have been put into production for retail sale. Most artwork in the show are one-of-a-kind pieces, Mahder says.

Furniture artists often give us glimpses into what the furniture in our homes will look like in the future. But Waldo hesitates to make any specific predictions based on work in the Blue Room exhibition.