UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation investigates modernist artists and designers as they used the functional craft of woodworking to enact value for marginalized working bodies. Art historians have acknowledged self-conscious labor within modernism, mapping the ways in which work can signal class, nationalism, and technological mastery. Received histories of American modernism document a wide range of instances where painters, sculptors, and printmakers using the work of art making as a medium in and of itself. Modernist wood was another mid-twentieth-century genre for utilizing the tools and techniques of manufacturing as components of performance. This history, however, is largely ignored. Modernist woodworkers used the same strategies as their counterparts in the visual arts genres of painting, printmaking, and sculpture: they appropriated the technologies and manners of ordinary work and workers in order to enact a wide spectrum of human modalities that modernism questioned—competence, physicality, efficacy, lack of affect, hyper-masculinity, and executive control among others. This project interrogates the stakes of the hands-on work with furniture making and carpentry that modernist woodworkers performed.

The methodology that I am using is twofold: a medium-specific investigation into modernist wood that spans disciplinary boundaries of art, design, architecture, and craft; and an analytic framework of biography of practice. Each of the three main chapters for this dissertation is a case study tracing the career development of a single woodworker. The first chapter, “Molly Gregory’s Community Leadership,” investigates woodworker and educator Mary (Molly) Gregory (1914-2006) as she used cooperative woodworking projects to foster communities that were models of participatory democracy. The second chapter, “Isamu Noguchi’s Ingenuity in Representing America,” investigates designer-sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) as he used the functional craft of set building to manifest an American identity of purposeful innovation. The third chapter, “George Nakashima’s Self-Actualization,” analyzes studio furniture innovator George Nakashima (1905-1990) as he practiced furniture making as a demonstration of multicultural ambassadorship. Each chapter traces the development of an individual craft practice, excavating the timely ideals and ethics that supported the emergence of modernist wood as a viable profession.

Gregory, Noguchi, and Nakashima each turned to woodworking after having experienced race- and gender-based marginalization from the established fields of modernist art and design. Taken together, their practice elucidates modernist wood as a socially engage genre that tested the amateur craft ideal of hands-on work with wood as a venue for self-making and a crucible for leadership.