Garry Knox Bennett: One of Each

October 3—November 1 at Gallery NAGA

Among all of the studio furnituremakers born in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s whose work has been canonized in museum exhibitions of the past two decades, Garry Knox Bennett has been the most unpredictable.  The variety of his objects – from massive and complex chests to tiny, curious boxes, from rock-solid utility to the amusement of ideas expressed as pure sculpture – and the range of his materials – just about any wood, metal, or plastic you can name, as well as found objects, paints, watercolors, enamels, beads, bone, and more – is just plain unmatched.

It is quixotic to attempt to summarize so vast and diverse a career, especially in one gallery show.  When the American Craft Museum (which reopens in New York next month in its new Columbus Circle home as the Museum of Arts and Design) sought to survey three decades of Bennett’s inventions in its 2001 retrospective Made in Oakland: The Furniture of Garry Knox Bennett it deployed over 175 pieces.

Thus, the thirteen objects in Garry Knox Bennett: One of Each can do no more than represent Bennett’s categories of activity, with one trestle table, one sideboard, one hall table, one lamp, one clock, one bench, one sawn sculpture, and so on.  The exhibition benefits greatly from the curatorial involvement of Bennett himself and his wife Sylvia, who will both visit from Oakland, California for the opening reception (Friday, October 3, 6-8 pm).  Most of the show, seven of the pieces, are drawn from the Bennetts’ personal collection, so we are privileged to consider works they’ve previously withdrawn from the market, including, refinished or otherwise spruced up for exhibition, the kitchen table, bench, and lamp they chose to live with for years and, in some cases, decades.

Given Bennett’s prominence, it is surprising that this exhibition is his first solo show in New England.  He threatens that it might be his last on the East Coast.  The effort to transport the work and himself to the East is an exertion he may pass up from now on, as he gathers his energies around himself in Oakland at 74, just across the line from Alameda where he was born a fourth-generation Alamedan.

Also opening in October, at the Fuller Craft Museum from October 4 through February 8, is Garry Knox Bennett: Call Me Chairmaker, a traveling exhibition organized by the Bellevue (Washington) Art Museum focused on the fantastically inventive chair series Bennett produced from 2003 to 2006, in which he reconsiders and puts his twist on some of the most iconic forms in 20th-century chair design.

In 2007 Bennett was featured in the Peabody Award-winning public television mini-series Craft in America.  This survey of “handmade” media devoted two of its fourteen profiles to studio furnituremakers: Sam Maloof, the California nonagenarian who perfected a refined, relaxed, unpainted wood Neo-Scandanavian/West Coast style, and Bennett, whose multifaceted work has been persuasively connected by many commentators to contemporary art and sculpture, to Duchamp and Rauschenberg (by the critic Arthur Danto), as well as to many points in the history of furniture.

In conjunction with the Bennett show Gallery NAGA also introduces the work of Alison McLennan, an emerging west coast furnituremaker.  Concentrating on tabletop objects, McLennan has produced jewelry boxes in the form of cacti and, in her recent palette lamp series, lamps whose shades are photographs of the urban landscape.