Woodworking loses its macho edge and embraces new shapes

It often starts with a box. These utilitarian objects are expressions of a woodworker’s technical rigor and style. But for Wendy Maruyama, who earned a master’s degree in furniture design from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York in 1980, boxes were also political statements. Early in her career, she created boxes awash in vivid color, perched atop 4-foot-tall stands with spiked handles on their lids. Auction sites frequently describe these pieces as “modesty boxes,” but they started out with a specific use: to hold an 18-pack of tampons.

“I loved the idea of gender-specific furniture, making something that men could not possibly grasp or experience,” Maruyama, 73, said in an email interview recently. One of the few women in the American studio furniture movement, a cohort that combined fine woodworking skills and artistic expression, she went on to build larger versions that held menstrual pads and sex toys.

Last year, the Fresno Art Museum in California handed Maruyama its Distinguished Woman Artist award and hosted her first career survey. No furniture-maker before her had received the honor, which had previously gone to sculptor Ruth Asawa, assemblage artist Betye Saar and weaver Kay Sekimachi. In November, Manhattan gallery Superhouse exhibited her prismatic tambour cabinets in “Colorama,” a show that also included furniture by her friend and fellow woodworker Tom Loeser.

Maruyama is not alone in stepping into a gender-specific spotlight. With boundaries dissolving between craft and high art, and women in both areas enjoying a new wave of appreciation, woodworking — which remains a male-dominated field — has become more interesting. It is filled with narrative content, social commentary and visually daring forms courtesy of its female makers. Pathbreakers of the American studio furniture movement who are now in their 70s and 80s are still creating new work, while younger generations of women who learned from them continue to advance the medium.

“Over the years, women are much more likely to be woodworkers or furniture-makers or designers,” said Rosanne Somerson, 70, a woodworker who co-founded the Rhode Island School of Design’s furniture design department in 1995 and later became the institution’s president. “With every generation, interests change. My generation had more of a lineage from high-level decorative arts, but women now are bringing in a lot more narrative interest and identity issues. It’s less about the highest levels of craft and more about the highest levels of expression — and almost provocation.”

Because the material carries so many cultural and ecological associations, it is well suited to engage with contemporary issues. Joyce Lin, 30, a furniture-maker in Houston, created her “Material Autopsy” series of conceptual domestic objects to explore the effects of our industrialized society and how most of us are far removed from how things are made. For one chair in the series, which looks like it was grown from a single log sliced open to reveal its rings, Lin riffed on the decorative arts tradition of faux bois, or realistic-looking artificial wood.

“When I post photos of the piece online,” Lin said, “I get people who think I actually grew the wood, and then there are a lot of people who think it was AI generated.”

For Kim Mupangilaï, 35, a Belgian Congolese interior designer in New York City, wood was a natural choice for her first furniture collection, in 2023.

“I really wanted my furniture to come from me, kind of like a self-portrait,” she said. Her utilitarian objects loosely refer to archival photographs taken in Central Africa and are made of materials common in Congolese crafts, including teak, banana fibers and rattan. Her Mwasi armoire, an hourglass-shaped piece with woven doors, is currently on view at “Making Home — Smithsonian Design Triennial” at the Cooper Hewitt museum in Manhattan, and she recently exhibited chairs and stools that refer to art nouveau and the colonial history of Belgium at the Fog Design + Art fair in San Francisco.

Deirdre Visser, 54, a curator and woodworker in San Francisco, said that speaking more directly about the role of gender in the field is important to welcoming new perspectives and creating more exciting objects.

Her commentary has taken the form of a recent book called “Joinery, Joists and Gender: A History of Woodworking for the 21st Century.” It features women and gender-nonconforming people involved with the medium: from medieval turners to the Shaker who developed the first circular saw, to contemporary artists like Katie Hudnall, who leads the woodworking and furniture program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Yuri Kobayashi, who studied under Maruyama at San Diego State University and taught furniture design at RISD for many years. (Lin was one of her students.)

Visser rejects the notion that to be classified as a female woodworker rather than just someone working in wood diminishes the maker.

“All of us have identities we bring to making, and that is, more and more, where the discussion is rooted,” she said. “The most cisgender, straight white male is also bringing identity and a set of experiences to the wood shop, and so this perceived neutrality of their identity as a maker is foolish.”

Faye Toogood, a British designer, has become more attuned to the ways that her identity shapes what she creates. She used wood for her earliest works but quickly shifted to industrial materials.

“I looked to my left and my right and thought, if I want to be taken seriously, I need to pick up bronzes and steel,” she said. “I now realize that was because I felt like I was wacky in a male-dominated field of industrial design.”

Recently, Toogood, 48, returned to wood with “Assemblage 7: Lost and Found II,” a series of monolithic chairs, tables and cabinets that includes pieces hand-carved from oak and covered in shellac, a finish popular in 18th-century England.

“It made the pieces really modern but feel quite ancient at the same time,” she said.

With all the leaps, woodworking can still be unwelcoming and isolating for women, and some makers are bent on building community and support.

Natalie Shook, 42, an artist and self-taught woodworker in New York City, is one of them. After her products grew from stools to large-scale modular shelving, she opened her own workshop. This allowed her to “completely insulate” herself from the hostility she had experienced at other shops, she said.

“There is not an energy or assumption that women can’t do things in our studio.”

Alexis Tingey and Ginger Gordon, who founded their woodworking studio, Alexis & Ginger, in 2023, a year after graduating from RISD, experienced culture shock once they left the cozy precincts of their academic furniture program. At school, they were able to “just focus on materiality and run full force into exploring and articulating our ideas,” Tingey, 34, said. “And that hasn’t always been the case since.”

Sometimes they are the only women in their workshops. “But at least we have each other,” she added.

Katie Thompson, 38, an artist in rural South Carolina, started a blog and Instagram account called Women of Woodworking in 2015 to connect with other makers.

“I felt pretty isolated as a woman woodworker at the time and wanted to help amplify the stories of other women and gender-nonconforming woodworkers out there so more people could see themselves being a part of the field, too,” she said. The community has grown to thousands of members from around the world and hosts interviews on Instagram Live and virtual meetups.

Practitioners hope the momentum continues.

“As much as I’d love to believe the next few years will bring more progress for women in these fields, the political climate doesn’t give me much hope,” Maruyama said. “But I’d like to be wrong. I’ve been pleasantly surprised before.”