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Castle

Wendell Castle: Wandering Forms—Works from 1959–1979 Curated by Evan Snyderman and Alyson Baker October 19, 2012, to February 24, 2013 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Wendell Castle

Celebrated American designer/craftsman Wendell Castle (b. 1932) has been creating unique pieces of handmade sculpture and furniture for over five decades. Castle, who has consistently challenged the traditional boundaries of functional design since the outset of his career, was instrumental in helping to shape the American studio furniture movement throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He remains one of the most important American furniture makers working today.

The pieces in this exhibition were chosen for their significance within Castle’s oeuvre, but also for the narrative they tell about his work and its relationship to the current environment for art and design. Almost all of them were hailed as revolutionary in changing the way we look at furniture and had an undeniable, though rarely explicitly recognized, influence on generations of artists and designers around the world. Together, these works tell the story of how Castle nimbly combined art, craft, and design, presenting a definitive study of his strong artistic vision. Many of the pieces are loaned from American institutions and private collections; some have not been on view to the public for decades, while others have never been displayed.

As an artist, Castle is renowned for his superb craftsmanship, his whimsically organic forms, and his development of original techniques for shaping solid, stacklaminated wood. His iconic masterpieces from the period of his career covered by this exhibition are fast becoming some of the most important and coveted examples of twentieth-century design.

Castle was one of a group of designers who were championed at the midtwentieth century by the burgeoning studio craft movement. His work was seen in groundbreaking exhibitions from the era, including Young Americans (Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York, 1962), Fantasy Furniture (Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York, 1966), and Wooden Works (Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, in conjunction with the Minnesota Museum of Art, 1972), which also featured work from these now iconic designer-craftsmen: George Nakashima, Sam Maloof, Wharton Esherick, and Arthur Espent Carpenter. Many of the artists who were included in these exhibitions, particularly in the field of woodworking, jewelry design, and ceramics, have since become cornerstones of the American art collections of fine art museums.

Perhaps Castle’s most highly publicized work was created for the exhibition Contemplation Environments (Museum of Contemporary Crafts, 1970), which earned a full-page review in the February 2, 1970, issue of Time magazine. Castle’s piece, Environment for Contemplation, was pictured and heralded as “the hit of the show.”

In addition to the works themselves, the large selection of never-before-seen drawings on view in Wandering Forms contextualize the work in the spirit of their time and reveal the thought process behind some of Castle’s most important pieces. The drawings also offer a unique insight into his endless flow of ideas and exceptional understanding of both two-dimensional and three-dimensional form. Since his student days, Castle has set aside time each day to draw, and these drawings represent only a fraction of his studies for furniture, architecture, and sculptural forms.

Baker Dining Chair, 1967 Courtesy of R 20th Century Photo: Sherry Griffin

Castle’s vast archives document the unique processes developed by the artist, such as stack-lamination and hand-worked fiberglass construction. These new ways of working with materials, as well as his exceptional facility as an artist and craftsman, helped catapult him to the top of his field almost instantaneously and separated his work from that of his contemporaries. The exhibition includes an extensive volume containing a near-complete collection of his press clippings and his 1966 appearance on the popular television game show, To Tell the Truth, will be screened on a monitor.

Wendell Castle was born in Kansas and received a BFA from the University of Kansas in Industrial Design and an MFA in sculpture, graduating in 1961.

He then moved to upstate New York to teach at the School for American Crafts at the Rochester Institute of Technology and established a permanent studio in the nearby town of Scottsville, New York.

Castle’s numerous accolades include a 1994 “Visionaries of the American Craft Movement” award sponsored by the American Craft Museum and a 1997 Gold Medal from the American Craft Council. In 2007 he received the Modernism Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, among others. His work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York; the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Detroit Art Institute; and Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877 Tel 203.438.4519, Fax 203.438.0198, aldrichart.org

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum advances creative thinking by connecting today’s artists with individuals and communities in unexpected and stimulating ways.

Board of Trustees Eric G. Diefenbach, Chairman; Linda M. Dugan, Vice-Chairman; Annadurai Amirthalingam, Treasurer/Secretary; Richard Anderson; William Burback; Chris Doyle; Mark L. Goldstein; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Gregory Peterson; Peter Robbins; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus; John Tremaine

Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder

Lindemann Collection, Miami Beach; Mariano Brothers Specialty Moving; The O’Grady Foundation.

Plastic Two-headed Table, 1969 Collection of Maria and Gonzalo de la Pezuela Photo: Sherry Griffin

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