Wendell Castle Imagined - The Revelation of the Creative Process
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Artist Link: Wendell Castle
Celebrated American designer/craftsman Wendell Castle (1932 - 2018) was born and educated in Kansas. He earned degrees in Industrial Design and Sculpture at the University of Kansas. Castle moved to Rochester, NY in 1962 to teach woodworking and furniture design at Rochester Institute of Technology in the School for American Craftsmen. In 1987, he became an Artist-in-Residence at RIT. He began working extensively with the Industrial Design program in 2010. He also maintained his own studio in Scottsville, NY.
Castle created unique pieces of handmade sculpture and furniture for over five decades. He consistently challenged the traditional boundaries of functional design from the outset of his career. Castle was instrumental in helping shape the American studio furniture movement throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He is remembered as one of the most important American designers, the "Father of art furniture".
Wendell Castle's work can be found in the permanent collections of more than 40 museums and cultural institutions worldwide, including: Art Institute of Chicago, (IL); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (CA); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY); Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); Minneapolis Institute of Arts, (MN); Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (Quebec, Canada); Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, (MA); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX); Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, (KS); Philadelphia Museum of Art (PA); Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, (Washington, DC); the Victoria & Albert Museum (London).
Castle has been the recipient of many honors and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants, three honorary degrees, a Visionaries of the American Craft Movement Award from the American Craft Museum (1994), the American Craft Council Gold Medal (1997), Master of the Medium Award from The James Renwick Alliance of National Museum of American Art, (1999), and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2007).
This exhibition is the first to focus on Wendell Castle’s creative process and the evidence of how he conceptualizes and creates. Work includes drawings, maquettes, and select sculptural and dimensional work.
Wendell Castle video: https://bit.ly/2zf9e6M
