This year I talked mostly to glass artists and potters, not by choice but because there were so few furniture makers. I doubt there were more than two dozen in the whole show. And when you eliminate some based on my aesthetic choices and some because they probably won’t want to travel from the west coast or Canada, the list is pretty slim.

Why is this? Well, I think furniture is a different bird than most other crafts. In the first place, it is more expensive. So if you add the 100% markup that most stores or galleries place on top of the maker’s price, it gets to be quite expensive for the end customer, usually pricing the item out of any sizable market.

In the second place, much of the market for craft furniture consists of work commissioned by the client to suit a specific need. This in fact is one of the major justifications for the higher prices commanded by one of a kind work. It can be tailored to the dimensional and contextual needs of the buyer. But beyond this, it fills a need which mass produced work never can, the potential for the client to become involved in creating something they cherish, knowing the maker and furthering his or her career. Selling through stores and galleries eliminates these vital connections.

Of course, as opposed to the Buyers Market,  the PIFS is a retail show (though we always have and welcome visitors from the interior design community and gallery world) where artists sell directly to the consumer. So this year’s visit to the Buyer’s Market reaffirmed my belief in the unique role the PIFS plays in nurturing the world of artisan made furniture. It is the place where the artist and the client meet to initiate the relationship which is at the core of the transaction.

Look just below a George Nakashima table and you see a base clearly in tune with the aesthetics of Japanese architecture. The elements are spare and the joinery exposed. Esherick’s work, which also embraces organic forms, is knottier and more angular. It is hard to look at his cabinetry and not think of the work, in various media, of the German expressionists of the 1920’s and 30’s.

Another input on the foreign side of the ledger is the influence of the Danish furniture maker and teacher, Tage Frid. Frid came to this country and got teaching positions at Rochester Institute of Technology and Rhode Island School of Design where he taught a whole generation of craft furniture makers, many of whom went on to be teachers themselves.

While Frid tried to convey the simplicity and economy of Scandinavian design (as well as sound craftsmanship), his pupils went off in several directions which weighted the influence tally firmly back in the domestic column.

Hank Gilpin, Jere Osgood, Alphonse Mattia, William Keyser, John Dunnigan, and Rosanne Somerson sent American Craft Furniture in new directions. Sam Maloof, James Krenov, Art Carpenter, Gary Knox Bennett, Wendy Maruyama,Wendell Castle and many others while not pupils of Frid’s, also played key roles in this transformation.

The preference for organic, natural forms embodied in Nakashima and Esherick’s work remained a strong force – one which saw a further elaboration in the stack laminated sculptural pieces of Dan Jackson and Wendell Castle. But Frid’s students helped take studio furniture in three new and related directions. These crafts people settled into what I like to call the three P’s – paraphrase, parody, and primitivism. Those who paraphrased took established forms and gave them modern re-interpretations – basing work on various styles such as Chippendale, Federal, Biedemeier, Art Deco, Shaker etc. The parodists, usually introduced humor into the mix. An example would be Ed Zucca’s “Shaker Television”, a chest incorporating many elements of Shaker design into a cabinet made to resemble a TV. Primitivist works tend to resemble the crafts of some unknown tribe, evoking the power of the spirit world by mimicking animal-like forms and coloration. Judy McKie and Wendy Murayama were the queens of this realm.

Of course, many furniture artists aren’t neatly pigeonholed into one of these categories and individual works sometimes contain elements from more than one category, but the influence of these trends is still clear and carries with it an important question. Paraphrase, parody, and primitivism all carry with them a heavy burden of the past. All of them achieve their power by using successful, known, forms as primary points of reference. The life blood of this work is its commentary on the past. The question is, could furniture artisans develop a more powerful vocabulary of form by embracing the technology, materials and social reality of the present?

As a furniture maker, over the last 25 plus years, a frustration for me has been that furniture did not feel, to me, like a medium in which I could similarly express myself.  Jewelry could be relatively quick, and the pieces could be small, and not necessarily expensive.  Furniture is not quick, nor are pieces of furniture minor.  Collecting a large body of my own work has never been one of my goals.

This economy has certainly changed my expectations, and business practice.  I am no longer backed up with commissions six to twelve months.   The bad news is that making a living has been more of a struggle.  The good news is that I have had time to think, and to develop  the beginnings of a new body of work. I realized that, at least for me, it was no longer acceptable not to be able to express my passions in my work, or at least, some of it.

In this country, and in the world today, there is only one issue that ultimately seems to matter,  and that is Global Climate Change.   I think that this is the most critical issue that humankind has ever faced………or not faced.  It has become a political issue, instead of a human issue.  The well-being of the human race, and many, many other species, and, in fact, the planet itself, are at stake.

I realized, I decided, that I need to “talk” about this in my work.  When I design, I work more from idea.  I am not the kind of artist who is always sketching, or who grew up that way.  I have always used photography to create images.  For me, in craft, in furniture, image comes from idea.  So, my search for image about climate change has led me to look at the “canaries in the coal mine.”  In looking at where we might see some of the earliest catastrophic effects of climate change, I thought about island nations that are scant feet above sea level.  The one for me that first comes to mind is the Maldives, a small island nation southwest of the tip of India.  They are already looking for land to move to when their islands go under water, sometime in the coming decades.  Their president,  Mohamed Nasheed was one of the most vocal delegates to the Copenhagen Conference, trying to lead a charge to convince the world of the need to return our atmospheric carbon level to 350 parts per million  (ppm).  So, my first piece is going to be a coffee table that will be about the Maldives, and will, in fact, have a top made of coconut palm plywood.  Coconut palm is the national tree of the Maldives.

At very least, my Maldives Table will be on exhibit at the PIFS in March.

You can see his work at http://richtannen.com/home.html.

But the synergy of design inspiration isn’t unidirectional. The design world has a lot to teach craftsman as well. Here I think of historical examples like the work of the Finnish architect and furniture designer Alvar Aalto.

If you aren’t afraid of a heady case of design fever, check out some of the links we have provided on our website (you’ll find them at the bottom right of your screen on every page) with various design blogs and sites.

At the time this encounter seemed to summarize everything that young people mistrusted about the world their parents expected them to join. It reeked of dead end meaningless jobs in a crushing corporate world. And, more to the point, it described an economy which mass produced products for their monetary value at the expense of any  connection to the natural world or creativity.

It is not surprising that this is a time which produced a great renaissance of craft. Young people (myself included) wanted to be more than machine operators or number crunchers. They wanted to have a greater connection to the natural world and have an outlet for their own creativity through the things they made.

In the thirty years from 1970-2000 an infrastructure grew up around the making of craft. Schools developed programs, magazines were brought out and shows and galleries were born and thrived. But every social and cultural trend is subject to transformation by forces both from within and from without and the craft renaissance was no exception.

Young makers of craft with dreams of a world where goods of greater integrity were bought and used by a mass audience slowly realized that they could not escape the logic of the machine economy. Producing things which were labor intensive made them expensive and limited their audience to the well-to-do. This in turn drove an aesthetic more linked to the art world and less to the use value of the object.

At the same time, the industrial design world became far more adept at designing mass produced objects which were quirkier, cleverer, and had more “feel” to them. And of course, mass produced objects were mass marketed at prices more within reach of the general public.

This transformation of the design world has been so successful that it is tempting when speaking to younger people thinking of a vocation in the craft world to whisper one word in their ear, “IKEA”.

But before we bemoan the shrinking of the craft world and start feeling sorry for ourselves, we need to pause with a thought about the present and also about the future. It is true that people are more interested in design now and less in craft. The back story of how the object was made seems to have less impact for reasons both monetary and ideological. But part of the reason people have a greater fascination with the design world is due to our very success.

Many of the ideas which I saw in the furniture my contemporaries showed and sold in the 70’s and 80’s are now commonplace in the design palette of, dare I say it, Ethan Allen. (It is also very possible that some of the drive for greater contact with the natural world inherent in the craft movement has been sublimated into the greater present interest in organic foods).

But one lesson here is we shouldn’t neglect our role as a kind of avant garde  for the world of industrial design. Just as the wave of earnest young revolutionary artists of the 1920’s and 30’s Germany produced the Bauhaus, which sought to infuse the vitality of the art world into mass production, there is no reason that today’s craft artists shouldn’t explore designs and technics applicable to industry.

At the same time, there will always be a place for objects simply outside the capabilities of mass production. There will always be a place for the maker who responds to the chance encounter with the particular graining in a piece of wood or the unexpected glaze  coming out of  the kiln. We just need to realize that this will be a field with a more limited audience and one which we need to continually educate – both about the unique possibilities of the hand made object and about the richness which comes in a relationship with the maker.

We are now just a little over two months out from the show and today I started to feel the swell of last minute applicants headed toward shore. Over the past few days applications have been coming in from exhibitors hoarding their precious cash resources until the last possible minute. Just this morning we got a phone call and an email from some more late comers. These two span the gamut of reasons for late applications in the current economic climate .

The first, this morning’s phone call from a potential exhibitor in the south, said things were slow on the commissioned custom work and cabinetry side of the ledger and he wants to see if he could sell some furniture. Although he is a seasoned veteran, this would be his first show. Being a careful sort he visited the show last year to scope it out.

The second were producers of extremely sophisticated work which I first encountered at the Philadelphia Craft Show. These folks sat on the fence for a long time but finally concluded that exposure was the name of the game.

No one needs to be told about the precarious nature of the economy. But last year’s show I think was a good lesson about marketing for small scale artisans. Everyone went into the show (myself included) holding their collective breaths – would anyone come, would anyone buy?

In fact, we had a significant increase in both attendance and purchases. Folks who buy furniture and furnishings are surviving and still have an appetite to buy. It is more important than ever that we not hunker down in our shops but get out there and be seen. We are about 3/4 full, so if you want to come on board but have been nervous about the economy and now are embarrassed about coming in late, stop thinking and get in touch.