FUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS: ARTIST-MADE FURNITURE

The New York Times described Robert Wilson as “a towering figure in the world of experimental theater and an explorer in the uses of time and space on stage. Transcending theatrical convention, he draws in other performance and graphic
arts, which coalesce into an integrated tapestry of images and sounds.” Susan Sontag has said of Wilson’s work, “it has the signature of a major artistic creation. I can’t think of any body of work as large or as influential.” Born in Waco, Texas, Wilson was educated at the University of Texas and Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, where he took an interest in architecture and design. He studied painting with George McNeil in Paris and later worked with the architect Paolo Solari in Arizona. Moving to New York City in the mid-1960s, Wilson found himself drawn to the work of pioneering choreographers George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Martha Graham, among others artists. By 1968 he had gathered a group of artists known as The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, and together they worked and performed in a loft building at 147 Spring Street in lower Manhattan. Performing Arts In 1969 two of Wilson’s major productions appeared in New York City: The King of Spain at the Anderson Theater, and The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In 1971 Wilson received international acclaim for Deafman Glance (Le Regard du Sourd), a silent opera created in collaboration with Raymond Andrews, a talented deaf-mute boy whom Wilson had adopted. After the Paris premiere of the work, French Surrealist Louis Aragon wrote of Wilson, “he is what we, from whom Surrealism
was born, dreamed would come after us and go beyond us.” Wilson then went on to present numerous acclaimed productions throughout the world, including the seven-day play KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace in Shiraz, Iran
(1972); The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, a twelve-hour silent opera performed in New York, Europe, and South America (1973); and A Letter for Queen Victoria in Europe and New York (1974-1975). In 1976 Wilson joined with composer Philip Glass in writing the landmark work Einstein on the Beach, which was presented at the Festival d’Avignon and at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, and has since been revived in three world tours in 1984, 1992 and 2012-2015. After Einstein, Wilson increasingly worked with European theaters and opera houses. His productions were frequently featured at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, the Schaubühne Berlin, the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, and the Salzburg Festival, among many other venues. At the Schaubühne he created Death Destruction & Detroit (1979) and Death Destruction & Detroit II (1987); and at the Thalia he presented four groundbreaking musical works, The Black Rider (1991), Alice (1992), Time Rocker (1996), and POEtry (2000). In the early 1980's Wilson developed what still stands as his most ambitious project: the multinational epic the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down. Created in collaboration with an international group of artists, Wilson planned this opera as the centerpiece of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles. Although the full epic was never seen in its entirety, individual parts have been produced
in the United States, Europe and Japan. Robert Wilson has designed and directed operas at La Scala in Milan, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Opéra Bastille in Paris, the Zürich Opera, the Hamburg State Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Houston Grand Opera and the Moscow Bolshoi, among others. His productions include Salome (Milan, 1987), Parsifal (Hamburg, 1991), The Magic Flute (Paris, 1991), Lohengrin (Zürich, 1991), Madama Butterfly (Paris, 1993), Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung (Salzburg, 1995), Four Saints in Three Acts (Houston, 1996), Pelléas et Mélisande (Salzburg, 1997), Orpheus and Eurydice (Paris, 1999), Der Ring des Nibelungen (Zürich, 2000- 2002), Aida (Brussels, 2002), Leos Janacek’s Osud (Prague, 2002), Die Frau ohne Schatten (Paris, 2003), Gluck’s Alceste (Brussels, 2004), Bach’s Johannes-Passion (Paris, 2007), Brecht/Weill’s Threepenny Opera (Berlin, 2007), Gounod’s Faust (Warsaw, 2008), Der Freischütz (Baden-Baden, 2009), Katya Kabanova (Prague, 2010), Norma (Zürich, 2011), Verdi’s Macbeth (Bologna / Sao Paulo, 2013), a Monteverdi trilogy consisting of L’Orfeo (2009), Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria (2011) and L’incoronazione di Poppea (2014) in Milan and Paris, La Traviata (Linz, 2015) and The Troubadour (Parma, 2018).
He has presented innovative adaptations of works by writers such as Virginia Woolf (Orlando, Berlin, 1989), Henrik Ibsen (When We Dead Awaken, Cambridge Mass., 1991; Lady from the Sea, Ferrara, 1998; Peer Gynt, Oslo, 2005), Gertrude Stein (Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Berlin, 1992; Saints and Singing, Berlin, 1997), Wole Soyinka (Scourge of Hyacinths, Geneva, 1999), Georg Büchner (Woyzeck, Copenhagen, 2000), Jean de la Fontaine (Les Fables de la Fontaine, Paris, 2004), Samuel Beckett (Happy Days, Luxembourg, 2008; Krapp’s Last Tape, Spoleto, 2009), Homer (Odyssey, Athens, 2012), Daniil Kharms (The Old Woman, Manchester, 2013), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Faust I and II, Berlin, 2015), and Sophocles (Oedipus, Pompeii, 2018). His longstanding love to Indonesia led Robert Wilson to direct I La Galigo (Singapore, 2004), a play based on a sacred text from Southwest Sulawesi. Later on, Wilson directed Rumi: in the blink of the eye, based on Sufi mystic poetry (Athens, 2007), and 1433—The Grand Voyage, a Ming- Dynasty parable (Taiwan, 2010). Wilson has collaborated with a number of internationally acclaimed artists, writers, and musicians. He worked closely with the late German playwright Heiner Müller on the Cologne section of the CIVIL warS (1984), Hamletmachine (1986), and Quartet (1987). With singer/song-writer Tom Waits, Wilson created the highly successful production The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets (Hamburg, 1991), as well as Alice (Hamburg, 1992) and Woyzeck (Copenhagen, 2000). His collaboration with Lou Reed also resulted in three works for the stage: Time Rocker
(Hamburg, 1996), POEtry (Hamburg, 2000) and Lulu (Berlin, 2011). With David Byrne, Wilson staged The Knee Plays from the CIVIL warS (1984), and later The Forest, in honor of the 750th anniversary of the City of Berlin (1988). He worked with poet Allen Ginsberg on Cosmopolitan Greetings (1988) and with performance artist Laurie Anderson on Wilson's adaptation of Euripides's Alcestis (1986). Writer Susan Sontag joined Wilson in creating Alice in Bed (1993), and together they developed a new work, Lady from the Sea (1998), based on Ibsen’s classic and since revived in many different languages. Wilson's long association with noted opera singer Jessye Norman began with Great Day in the Morning (Paris, 1982) and continued with a stage and video work based on Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise in 2001. Other important collaborations include The Temptation of St. Anthony (Duisburg, 2003) and Zinnias (Montclair, 2013) with Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon; Büchner’s Leonce and Lena (Berlin, 2003) with Herbert Grönemeyer; The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic (Manchester, 2011) with Antony; Peter Pan (Berlin, 2013), Pushkin’s Fairy Tales (Moscow, 2015) and Edda (Oslo, 2017) with CocoRosie, and The Sandman (Recklinghausen, 2017) with Anna Calvi.

Visual Arts
While known for creating highly acclaimed theatrical pieces, Wilson's work is firmly rooted in the fine arts. His drawings, paintings and sculptures have been presented around the world in hundreds of solo and group showings. Major Wilson exhibitions have appeared at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1991); the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1991); the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1991); and the Instituto de Valencia de Arte Moderno (1992). Wilson has created
original installations for the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1993); London’s Clink Street Vaults (1995); Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (1997); Guggenheim Museum (2000); Museum of Art and Design Copenhagen (2000); Passionsfestspiele Oberammergau and Mass. MOCA (2000-2001); Vitra Design Museum in Weil, Germany (2001); the Parisian Galeries Lafayette (2002); Barbier- Mueller Museum for Precolumbian Art in Barcelona (2004); the Pierre Bergé Yves Saint Laurent Foundation (2004); Aichi World Exhibition Nagoya (2005); Oerol Festival (2008); Norsk Teknisk Museum Oslo (2011); Norfolk and Norwich Festival (2012); Kunstfest Weimar (2012); Minneapolis Institute of Art (2018); Max Ernst Museum Brühl (2018). His tribute to Isamu Noguchi has been shown at Vitra Museum (2001), the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid (2002), the Rotterdam Kunsthal (2003), the Noguchi Garden Museum in New York (2004), the Seattle Art Museum (2006) and the L.A.- based Japanese American National Museum (2006). His installation of the Guggenheim’s Giorgio Armani retrospective (2000) traveled to Bilbao, Berlin, London, Rome, Tokyo, Shanghai and Milan (from 2000 to 2007). For the Louvre Museum in Paris, Wilson curated and designed the exhibit “Living Rooms,” featuring around 700 artworks from his Watermill Collection (2013). In 2004 Robert Wilson started his Video Portraits, a series of HD video works on subjects that include celebrities such as Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, Winona Ryder, Alan Cumming, Jeanne Moreau, Johnny Depp, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Renee Fleming, Sean Penn and Robert Downey Jr. as well as a variety of animals (the Snowy Owl “KOOL”, a black panther, a porcupine etc.). These works have been shown in more
than 50 exhibitions worldwide, including at MoMa PS1, Paula Cooper Gallery and Phillips de Pury & Co. in New York, Ace Gallery Los Angeles, Kunsthalle Hamburg, ZKM Karlsruhe, Academy of the Arts Berlin, Museum of Modern Art Salzburg,
Times Square New York, Palazzo Madama Torino, the University of Toronto’s Art Center, and the Louvre Museum in Paris. His drawings, prints, videos and sculptures are held in private collections and museums throughout the world, notably The Metropolitan Museum of Art; MoMA; the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Vitra Design Museum; Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Menil Foundation Collection, Houston.

Awards and Honors
A recipient of two Rockefeller and two Guggenheim fellowships, Wilson has been honored with numerous awards for excellence. In 1986 Wilson was the sole nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for the CIVIL warS. He received two Hewes Design Awards for A Letter to Queen Victoria (1975) and the CIVIL warS Act V (1987); a Bessie Award for The Knee Plays (1987); two Italian Premio Ubu awards for Alice and Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1994 and 1992); the Golden Lion Award for Sculpture of the Venice Biennale for Memory/Loss (1993); the German Theater Critics Award for The Black Rider (1990); a Reumert Prize for Woyzeck (2001); the Smithsonian National Design Award (2001); the French Theater Critics Award for A Dream Play (2002); an International Design and Communication Award for Mind Gap (2012); and an Olivier Award for Einstein on the Beach as “Best New Opera Production” (2013). Wilson was honored with several lifetime achievement awards, including: Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (1996); Premio Europa for Theater, Taormina (1997); Tadeusz Kantor Prize, Cracow (1997); Pushkin Prize, Moscow (1999); Rosa d’Oro, Palermo
(2007); Prix Italian and the Fendi Foundation Award (both in 2012); Paez Medal of Art / Venezuela (2013) and the German Goethe Institute’s Medal for the Arts (2014). He has been named a “Lion of the Performing Arts” by the New York
Public Library (1989); “Texas Artist of the Year” by the Art League of Houston (1995); received an Institute Honor from The American Institute of Architects in New York City (1988); the Harvard Excellence in Design Award (1998); and was
elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2000). The President of France pronounced him Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (2003) and later Officer of the Legion of Honor (2014). The President of Germany awarded
him the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit (2014). Wilson holds Honorary Doctorate degrees from the Pratt Institute (1991), the California College of Arts and Crafts (1994), the University of Toronto (2005), the University of Bucharest (2008), the American University of Paris (2010), the City University of New York (2013), the Sorbonne Nouvelle University (2013) and the University of Hartford (2016). In 1997, April 18th was declared “Robert Wilson Day”
by the legislature in the State of Texas.

Robert Wilson’s Legacy
Since the early 1990s, Robert Wilson has held workshops for students and experienced creative professionals from around the world at the International Summer Arts Program at The Watermill Center in Eastern Long Island – an interdisciplinary laboratory for the Arts and Humanities. Following a successful capital campaign, construction of a permanent facility was completed in the summer of 2006, enabling the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation to offer residencies, lectures and performances, and educational programs throughout the year.

Mary Heilmann was born in 1940 in San Francisco, California. She earned a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1962), and an MA from the University of California, Berkeley (1967). She moved to New York the following year, in 1968. Since then, Heilmann’s work has appeared in three Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1972, 1989, 2008) and is included in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco MoMA, National Gallery of Art, the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, Netherlands, and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2017), was a United States Artists Oliver Fellow (2014), has received the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award (2006) and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. “Mary Heilmann: Starry Night” an early body of work is currently on exhibit at Dia Beacon NY. Mary Heilmann lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York and New York City.

Heilmann is represented by Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York.

maryheilmann.com

Photo: Jo Ann Comfort

Evan Yee is an artist, designer and welder running a project based studio in Brooklyn, New York. Often taking on collaborative work with designers, Evan designs and fabricates high end furniture and metalwork that often borders on sculpture. Not limited by field or function, Yee’s multidisciplinary expertise brings anything from conceptual art to product engineering and invention into the studio.

Evan Yee’s fine arts background has brought him to residencies such as the Rauschenberg Residency and his work to museums and galleries such as the Parish Art Museum, The Hole Gallery and Wallplay. His conceptual art installations include his show “The App Store”, a contemporary critique of modern technology, and a collaborative show called “The Museum of Capitalism” in Oakland California. Often, Yee’s work is iconic the times, allowing viewers to shift their perspective and reflect upon global cultural phenomena.

Guild Garden Table and Chair

In 2015 I found myself working closely with a number of furniture makers and woodworkers. Together we embarked on a mission to build a unique industrial and creative space to host skilled members of the maker community. We called it Liberty Labs Foundation. As of today, our collective studio has been host to an international community of skilled craftspeople, designers, architects and artists.

My background is in the arts, but since Liberty Lab’s inception I’ve been deeply influenced by my peers in the contemporary design world. Their work blurs the line between furniture and fine arts. I often see designs from our studio that bend the meaning of utilitarian. A chair made out of mortise and tenon wooden balls, woven metal stair railings and cast iron chairs are just a few examples.

Being among some of the finest craftspeople has taught me to hone my own abilities. My artwork being primarily in metal and among woodworkers, my skills were immediately in demand. My art practice suddenly took a back seat to fabrication as everyone around me needed custom metal work. Every table base, chair frame, custom machined screw, pushed my metalworking practice to new heights and precision.

Now, eight years later, I feel like my art, fabrication and design practice are inseparable. I believe that a chair has as much to say as a painting, a custom turned brass screw just as beautiful as any sculpture. When I began fabricating, I felt I was neglecting my art practice. Instead, I look back and feel like I was freed of needing to call something I made “art”. Today it might be a chandelier, tomorrow a sculpture, the next day a miniature brass log cabin.

Making the Guild Garden pieces feels like the culmination of these merged practices. They had to be outdoors, on gravel and fairly lightweight, but not so lightweight that they blow over. The chairs had to be comfortable, but not need cushions and yet accommodate all body types. The tables needed enough space for three to four chairs. All this, and they had to all be taken inside when not in use, to fit inside a seven-foot by three-and-a-half foot broom closet.

I also felt the urge to create something that echoed Guild Hall’s iconic architecture and was immediately drawn to the unique quatrefoil-like windows, and the three arches. While paying homage to some of the historical architectural motifs, I also felt the chairs and tables needed to be something contemporary in lieu of the massive re-envisioning of Guild Hall.

The resulting design is stainless steel. While a heavy material, it allows for an airy design and thus a substantial yet light chair. It’s also perfect for outdoors. Being the optimal metal in commercial kitchens and on boating hardware, it doesn’t need a coating to resist rust, and it’s easy to keep clean and maintain. For concise storage, both the chairs and tables easily stack.

What sets the Guild Garden Chair and Table apart is the use of metal mesh. Meticulously, each wire of the mesh is welded down to create a light frameless look that stays tight and springy for a comfortable seat, but also a sturdy table surface. The mesh also reveals a glimpse of the table’s quatrefoil strut design, mimicking the mullions on the windows.

No matter what I decide to make, I am very intimate with the entire process. So, every bend, curve and weld on these chairs and tables was done by my hand. Doing this work in-house allows me to experiment with unconventional material combinations and new welding methods. This run of 18 chairs and 6 tables for Guild Hall brags 14,000 welds connecting the mesh wires to the frames.

I am honored to have these pieces part of Guild Hall’s permanent outdoor setting. With them, I aspire to elevate this historical gathering space and provide a foundation for the community to seat and converse, drink coffee and muse. When seated around these tables I hope one can enjoy this labor of love while basking in Mary Woodhouse’s vision to create an innovative environment to foster creativity within all who step inside Guild hall’s doors.

evanyee.com

Photo: Lizzie Brooks-Yee

About Liberty Labs Foundation

Liberty Labs Foundation is a collective studio of independent designers, artists, architects and highly skilled artisans. We are located in the historic Liberty Warehouse, once home to the Statue of Liberty before it was installed in New York Harbor in 1886. Our goal is to host makers with a variety of backgrounds in order to foster their independent practices in a collaborative and constructive environment.

In 2015, Liberty Labs was Founded by John Koten alongside co-founders Reed Hansuld, Pat Kim, Joel Seigle, Evan Yee and Tom Breglia. John saw particular talent in this young crew of makers that evolved into a vision of a collective studio. Together they embarked on a mission to build a unique industrial and creative space to host skilled members of the maker community.

Members of Liberty Labs Foundation foster relationships deeper than that of most co-workers. They are friends, and yet a family bound by similar interests and enriched by individual specialities. While members work independently, collaboration is the heart of our studio. Past members consistently remain a part of the Liberty Labs creative community. Since its inception, Liberty Labs has hosted an international community of designers, artists and makers.  Every person who has been a part of the space contributes to the collective soul that that imbues our studio. With every new member comes a new background, a new expertise and a new perspective that defines the evolution of what Liberty Labs Foundation is.

LibertyLabsFoundation.com                                            @LibertyLabsFoundation

Peter Dayton (b. 1955, New York) attended art schools in Europe in the 1970s and graduated in 1979 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he studied visual, video, and performance art. Initially he pursued music as an art project, then became a professional musician, first in the punk rock band Le Peste, then under his own name until 1986. He turned his attention back to visual art in 1988. Dayton’s work often references various art historical movements and concepts such as minimalism, pop art, abstract expressionism, and feminism. He simultaneously explores and critiques commodity culture and art historical movements through varied materials, techniques, and presentations.

Dayton has participated in solo and group exhibitions nationally, internationally, and extensively on the East End of Long Island. He has produced numerous site-specific installations and commissions for Louis Vuitton, Chanel, the Peter Marino Art Foundation, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to name a few. This is his first project for Guild Hall. 

Dayton lives and works in East Hampton, New York.

peterdayton.com

Artist, illustrator and designer Scott Bluedorn works in various media, including painting, drawing, print process, collage and found object assemblage. Drawing inspiration from cultural anthropology, primitivism, and nautical tradition, Bluedorn distills imagery that speaks to the collective unconscious, especially through myth and visual story-telling - a world he conjures as “maritime cosmology”. 

Born Southampton, NY 1986

Lives and works in East Hampton, NY 
BFA School of Visual Arts, NYC 2009