AMERICAN CHAIRWOMEN RECEIVE RECOGNITION

Female woodworkers lauded for gender-specific furniture

- DIANA BUDDS

It often starts with a box. These utilitarian objects are expressions of a woodworker's technical rigour 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 colour, perched atop pedestals 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 honour, 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.