Colorama

Superhouse is honored to present Colorama, a two-artist show with studio furniture legends Tom Loeser and Wendy Maruyama. The exhibition runs from November 14, 2024, to January 11, 2025, at 120 Walker Street, 6R, New York, NY.

In Colorama, the trailblazing artists return to their radical roots, transforming American fine art furniture. Now, Maruyama, who recently celebrated a career retrospective at Fresno Art Museum, and Loeser exhibit new works embellished with bold colors that hold all the finesse and sophistication only achieved from decades of making. While furniture artists today enjoy the freedom to choose material, technique, and finish, the duo’s break from traditional woodworking and finishing techniques over 40 years ago was tantamount to a revolutionary act.

In 1980, Fine Woodworking magazine published an article that featured a recently completed desk by new-to-the-scene Wendy Maruyama titled Decoration vs. Desecration. The expressive new form used a millennia-old mortise and tenons method to join several wood planes. However, Maruyama filled the mortises with vibrant purple resin, shockingly contrasting with the honey tones of the naturally finished wood.  Maruyama emblazoned the entire writing surface with a large “W” to sign the work. The publication and its readership panned the piece, describing Maruyama as on the “artistic fringe” and the work a “functional disaster” and “adolescent nonsense.” In today’s vernacular, Maruyama clapped back at the haters:

“I have chosen to use wood in a different context and find it exciting to use other materials with the wood. It is my freedom of choice to do what I feel satisfies my personal motivations to use my hands and make a piece of furniture. What I do to decorate my furniture is not any different from the early painted chests of the 1700s or the claw-and-ball feet of Chippendale chairs – it’s all a form of embellishment. My pieces function (both visually and as furniture) quite well for me, and that is my goal in my work.”

Maruyama’s nonconformity and defiant response would cement her position as a radical provocateur in the staid, conservative, and male-dominated world of studio furniture and woodworking. 

Similarly, in the early 1980s, Tom Loeser began eschewing the norms of the first generation of fine art furniture makers. History would define that earlier generation by their allegiance to wood and by designs that emphasize the beauty of natural materials and forms. Instead, Loeser was drawn to the motivations behind Italy’s Memphis Group “not so much because I like the stuff, but because it opened up the field and made more things possible and accepted. It and other things have opened people’s minds about what furniture can be and do.” Thus, Loeser’s early work began to include dense geometric patterns and color on carved surfaces, a complete shift from the fine art furniture that had come before. In 1983, Loeser met Maruyama at the Appalachian Center for Crafts when she invited him for a residency. There, Maruyama inspired Loeser to use paint more casually. Following this advice, Loeser shifted toward a more exploratory and adventurous use of paint and color that would define his work through today.

Begun in Tennessee, the pair’s creative kinship continues across half a continent. Maruyama, in San Diego, California, and Loeser, in Madison, Wisconsin, collaborated throughout the making of Colorama to ensure an overall cohesiveness to the exhibition. While both revisit the transgressive color that defined their early careers, the artists’ present conditions influenced their points of view for the works included in the show. Maruyama’s technicolor wall-mounted cabinets explore femininity and health, shaped by the artist’s own experience of aging. Loeser’s painted and upholstered seating explores social dynamics, fostering collaboration and play between sitters at a time of much political and social divisiveness. After nearly 50 years of pushing their field forward, Colorama offers a look at what Maruyama and Loeser are interested in now.

About Tom Loeser
Tom Loeser is a renowned member of the Studio Craft movement. He designs and builds one-of-a-kind functional and dysfunctional objects that are often carved and painted. Loeser looks to the history of design and object-making as a starting point for developing new forms and meanings. Beginning in 1981, the artist has exhibited his work globally, including at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Paris, France) and Peter Joseph Gallery (New York, NY). He was head of the wood/furniture area at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from 1991-2020. Loeser holds a BA from Haverford College, a BFA from Boston University’s Program in Artisanry, and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Loeser has received four Visual Artist Fellowship Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Selected public collections that hold his work include the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, USA), The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (New York, USA), Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, USA), Mint Museum (Charlotte, USA), The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston, USA), and others. See more.

About Wendy Maruyama
Furniture maker, artist, and educator Wendy Maruyama has been making innovative work for over 40 years. While her early work combined ideologies of feminism and traditional craft objects, her newer work moves beyond the boundaries of traditional studio craft and into the realm of social practice. Wendy Maruyama has been a woodworking and furniture design professor for over 30 years. She is among the first two women to graduate with a Master's in furniture making from Rochester Institute of Technology. Maruyama has exhibited her work nationally with solo shows in New York City, San Francisco, Scottsdale, Indianapolis, Savannah, and Easthampton. She has exhibited internationally in Tokyo, Seoul, and London. National and international permanent museum collections hold Maruyama's work, including the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, England), Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, USA), Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery (Launceston, Australia), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, USA), Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, USA), Museum of Art and Design (New York, USA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, USA), Mint Museum (Charlotte, USA), and Fuller Craft Museum (Brockton, USA). Maruyama is a recipient of several prestigious awards, including the California Civil Liberties Public Education Grant, 2010; several National Endowment for the Arts Grants for Visual Artists; the Japan/US Fellowship; and a Fulbright Research Grant to work in the UK. In 2024, the American Craft Council awarded her the Gold Medal for Consummate Craftsmanship. Maruyama's first solo museum exhibition, Wendy Maruyama: A Sculptural Survey, is currently on view at the Fresno Art Museum, California, through January 5, 2025. See more.