Laurel Bradley

Functional Sculpture: Furniture from the Upper Midwest celebrates creativity as a hinge between the aesthetic and the practical realms. Each of the 16 artist-designers in the exhibition grapples with translating idea to object in chairs, tables, lamps, benches, and music stands. Makers from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan find ways to keep design, visual pleasure, physical comfort, and the practical processes of manufacture in balance within a single piece of furniture.

Woodworking is not usually counted among the liberal arts. But a woodshop has been a fixture at Carleton, a leading liberal arts college, since 1950, and since 1992 Carleton students have labored with manual and power tools to create furniture for academic credit. Boliou Hall of Art, which opened in 1950, was designed to include fine art workshops, open for use by all students and faculty members, with almost every kind of art tool, including extensive woodworking equipment. The brainchild of art department chair Alfred Hyslop, the student workshops were inspired by a similar program at Dartmouth College. With facilities for woodworking, printmaking, jewelry, and ceramics, the workshops were a place to foster habits of creativity outside the classroom and to model productive leisure after college. The “habitual attitude of creativeness,” which President Laurence McKinley Gould saw developing in students regularly using the workshops, contributed to maintaining America’s foundational principal of democracy. “When a so-called free society ceases to be creative, it becomes preservative and thereby ceases to be a democracy,” Gould said.

Timothy Lloyd, jeweler and metalsmith, was hired to run the student workshops in 1964. Under his benign direction, activities in the workshops ebbed and flowed according to particular student needs and interests. For example, platform beds were a popular project in the fall. The benefits of the workshops were defined in specifically non-curricular terms: Without reference to grades and credits, students were invited to test their achievements in craft media against purely personal goals.

Gradually, as the art department expanded throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, adding faculty members and fine art media, the workshops were used for classroom assignments. The workshop goals of developing skill in the use of tools and equipment, increasing knowledge of and respect for materials, and sharpening aesthetic reaction and judgment harmonized with the aims of the studio art curriculum. Faculty members were united in the conviction that the many tools housed in the workshops constituted a vocabulary of artistic methods enabling artistic expression. Carleton expanded Boliou Hall in the early 1990s, and part of the expansion included a dedicated woodworking studio. Rick Salafia, hired as a visiting assistant professor in 1991, offered a course titled “Western Traditions in Woodworking” in the newly remodeled facility.

The liberal arts are defined conventionally as broad humanistic knowledge, in opposition to mere occupational or professional skills. Woodworking at Carleton, now comfortably at home in the studio arts curriculum, is a distinctly humanistic pursuit. Since 1998 Professor Stephen Mohring has challenged students to apply their knowledge of the visible and tactile world to the process of designing and making a table in his course titled “Woodworking: The Table.” The table becomes a means of testing ideas against the reality of materials and construction methods, a way of connecting an intensified visual ability to actions within the lived environment. Functional Sculpture: Furniture from the Upper Midwest, scheduled to coincide with Mohring’s 2008 woodworking course, should provoke, inspire, and assist not only Carleton students, but the larger community of individuals who think with their hands, know with their eyes, and understand with their souls.