Aspen Golann

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Woodworker, furniture-maker, artist and educator Aspen Golann trained at the renowned North Bennet Street School in Boston and specializes in building furniture with the techniques of 18th and 19th century American fine woodworking. Her pieces aren’t mere modern iterations of a centuries-old tradition, however. They also often exhibit very modern feminist touches that acknowledge and subvert the power and function of furniture, traditionally made by men, that is created for domestic spaces, historically the domain of women.

Aspen’s work has earned her the admiration of the arts-and-crafts establishment. Her work has been featured in American Craft magazine, Fine Woodworking magazine and Architectural Digest. In 2020 she was the recipient of the Mineck Furniture Fellowship from the Society of Arts and Crafts, and this year The Maxwell Hanrahan Foundation gave her one of its prestigious $100,000 unrestricted Awards in Craft. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and in national and international craft workshops.

Three years ago, thanks in part to the Minreck Fellowship, Aspen created The Chairmaker’s Toolbox, a three-pronged project that provides free tools, education and mentorship for BIPOC, gender-expansive and female chair- and toolmakers seeking to build sustainable businesses. 

Here Aspen describes how she herself homed in on her exact passion and explains the inventive ways in which The Chairmaker’s Toolbox makes a career in woodworking a little less daunting for craftspeople who have traditionally been excluded from the field. 

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

• How did you get into woodworking?
• When you decided to become deeply educated in woodworking, what was that like for you? Because you were 29 or 30, were you on the older end? Were there other women? Other queer women there? How were you approached by teachers?
• At what point did you feel that you could start putting conceptual ideas into what you’re making and maybe start making up your own rules or breaking what you had learned?
• What has your practice taught you about yourself that you might not have known had you not dived into woodworking?
• What do you think are the main barriers that make it difficult for an underrepresented person to feel at home in the craft of woodworking?
• How did you decide to help people knock down those barriers and how does your creation, The Chairmaker’s Toolbox, go about knocking them down?
• It must be terrifically expensive to create your studio, right? How long did it take you? You have a story about how you got your tools, right?
• How do you think the field of contemporary woodworking would change if it were more diverse?

Pier Carlo: How did you get into woodworking?

Aspen: I wanted to be a fine artist for a long time. I was very lucky and got to go to a super artsy high school that had a really powerful program, and they were all about conceptual art, drawing, painting, sculpture, pure fine art essentially. And I was always fighting the fact that my favorite part of the process was so crafty. It was the part where I just already knew what I was doing and I was just lost in the process of doing it. I felt like a fraud for a long time or a lesser maker, a lesser creator for that reason, and I tried to be an artist forever and ever and ever. Finally, I was just like, “The thing that drives me, the thing that gets me into the studio is this weird balance between rules and no rules. It’s not no rules. It’s the tension there.” 

I remember realizing at one point that I play much more bravely in a fenced area. If you give me rules, if you give me a space that’s mine to explore, then I’m wild, but if there’s no boundary, then I get quite timid. I think a lot of people do. The fear of the blank canvas, right? And so, with furniture, there’s no blank canvas! There’s never a blank canvas. There’s always something to push up against. You’re looking at a chair, the thing you’re pushing up against is the human body. The final reality of that object is that a person is going to sit in it, and so there are all of these functional restrictions that come up as a result of the fact that that’s what that thing is destined to be. So then me as a maker, I get to walk into that fenced yard, that space where there’s rules but not so many, but just enough that it ignites me. 

I’m frustrated at times it took so long, but mostly I’m just thrilled that I got to the point where I stopped berating myself for not being the type of artist that I thought was best or that I most wanted to be as a kid and instead just embraced the type of artist that I am, made space for it, did it. Then because it is so much more in alignment with who I am, I got so much better at it than I would ever have gotten at fine art, because I love doing this. So I go to the studio every day.

That’s what I mean by the luck of the draw, in terms of getting a chance to be exposed enough times to the thing that most aligns with your own capacities that it becomes possible to do it and build that architecture around it. I had many exposures to wood, and I rejected most of them. [She laughs.] 

It finally happened at the end. I ended up enrolled in a sculpture class. I transferred colleges, and I really wanted to take an art class because I knew it was going to be miserably emotional to be a transfer student. I was like, “I’ve got to at least have an art class.” But because I was transferred, I had last dibs on art, and all the drawing and painting was full. So I had to take the only art class left, which was called Art with a Function, and it was essentially a furniture-building class. 

I took it and I hated it for the first two days, and I dropped it. Then I realized I just can’t do this first semester in a new place without some form of arts, so I came back and re-enrolled, and that class changed my life. And that instructor changed my life. 

Exposure to the thing and realizing you love it is one thing, but then having faith that you could actually place your creativity, your joy, your playfulness at the center of the thing that creates fiscal stability in your life, that is a whole other leap that it took me a very long time to make.

It still took me years to then go back and become a furniture maker. That’s like another level, right? Exposure to the thing and realizing you love it is one thing, but then having faith that you could actually place your creativity, your joy, your playfulness at the center of the thing that creates fiscal stability in your life, that is a whole other leap that it took me a very long time to make.

Pier Carlo: To pick up your metaphor of the fence, when you decided to become deeply educated in woodworking and the classical methods of woodworking, you entered the fence of school. What was that like for you? Because you were 29 or 30, were you on the older end? Were there other women? Other queer women there? How were you approached by teachers? 

Aspen: I think that it should be acknowledged the type of school that I wanted to go to was … . Essentially, I had all of these wacky ideas about work that I wanted to make but no practical knowledge of how to make them because that Art with a Function class was essentially a sculpture course. We didn’t do any furniture joinery. We used plywood; we didn’t use any hardwoods. I just didn’t know how to do anything, so my goal was not to go to one of these well-rounded programs that teach design and making at the same time. I just wanted to learn how, that’s all. I wanted a school that was essentially devoid of design work. I was like, “If I’m going to take a break from my cool, functional life and invest in another educational experience, I want it to be just how. This is what I’m hungry for.”

So I went to this school called the North Bennet Street School that’s the oldest industrial school in the United States. They have a bunch of programs. They have locksmithing, preservation carpentry, violinmaking, bookbinding, all this wild stuff. And furniture. The furniture that they make is all super-traditional, I guess 17th to 19th century American and British furniture. Chippendale, Sheraton, you would know it when you see it. They’re the old stuff in a wealthy grandmother’s house or something like that or things that you see rip-offs of in thrift stores, [laughing] basically the esthetically least appealing type of work in this era. 

But when I went and visited, when I looked at that stuff, all I saw was brushstrokes. I just saw curves. I was like, “Oh, if I could make that curve, I could do whatever I wanted. If I could make that leaf, maybe like fracture this little carved acanthus leaf, I could start seeing it as just a series of cuts instead.” I was like, “Oh my god, I’m seeing all of these skills that I want to be able to wield in my life.” And so, yeah, I enrolled there, even knowing that, to answer your question, it was going to be a really isolating experience. 

I think that 30 was pretty much the youngest I could have gone and really stuck with it because it was hard. I was actually the youngest in my cohort and the only woman, only queer person. There were two other women in the program when I was there, and one of them was queer. They’re actually a very good friend of mine. Now we work together quite a bit. It was very isolating, very strange. The instructors were all very sweet with me. Full endorsement to the North Bennet Street School. But the experience was just so deeply isolating and strange. 

I think one of the weirdest things is before enrolling in that school, I knew I was a woman, I identify as a woman, but I never thought about it. I taught high school for seven years, and no one when I was a high school teacher said, “Wow, you’re a female high school teacher!” It just didn’t come up. Then I start woodworking and all of a sudden, I’m a female woodworker, I’m a woman woodworker. Being a woman is now something that I am told I am every day and something that I start feeling in a very intimate and intense way that I had never felt it before. It’s just not an aspect of my personality that felt particularly important. And so it was the most bizarre thing ever to suddenly enroll in this school and be like, “Yep, you’re a girl.” 

It’s been that way ever since I’ve been a woodworker. I don’t think there’s been an article about me or a client who’s purchased work who hasn’t said something about it. So yeah, it starts to become part of your identity in a way that it wasn’t. It’s a highly contextual thing. People often ask me, “What does it mean to you to be a female woodworker?” And I’m like, “Well, a lot of things now.” But I’m honestly still surprised sometimes when I think about it. I recognize that it’s as fair to ask, “What does it feel like to be a male woodworker?” and to try to understand the way that gender plays a role if you’re marginalized or if you’re in the majority. It’s just a very interesting thing.

Pier Carlo: These are issues you bring up in the pieces that you make. You explore these themes of gender, queerness, power, history. Once you had learned all the rules of making furniture the traditional way, at what point did you — 

Aspen: All the rules. [She laughs.] I’ll never know all the rules,

Pier Carlo: Some fundamental rules, let’s say.

Aspen: Yeah, there you go.

Pier Carlo: At what point did you feel A) that you could start putting conceptual ideas into what you’re making and B) maybe start making up your own rules or breaking what you had learned?

Aspen: It started creeping in really early. It’s a great question. I think when I first enrolled at North Bennett, I made a promise to myself. I was like, “This is like someone who loves dancing having to the gym for two years.” I was like, “The goal here is not to do the thing you love; it’s to get really good at certain things that are going to allow you to do the thing you love at a way higher level.” So I was like, “Don’t dance. Just work out.”

That being said, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t keep myself from dancing a bit, even when I was at school. I think that my work and the way that I was bringing in femininity and queerness ended up being one of my coping mechanisms for getting through the experience of my schooling. It continues to be a coping mechanism that I use to get through the experience of being an underrepresented person in my field.

It parlays nicely with your last question, because thinking about myself as a woman and constantly carrying around that identity and doing woodwork at the same time, those things coalesced in this funny way, and I started to see the furniture itself as a stand-in for a physical female body. Furniture takes on very stereotypically female domestic roles in that it decorates, it’s seen and not heard, it performs invisible labor, its power is beauty. These are things about furniture that are also very aligned with these, again, stereotypical female domestic roles, and so I started seeing the furniture itself as taking on the physical presence of a woman in a home or in a space.

Also, because furniture interacts with the body so directly — chairs you sit on, tables you sit at — furniture objects have a relationship, a physical size relationship with the body. If you walk up to a cabinet, that cabinet is almost the same size as a person. You start paying attention to this stuff and you start seeing it. And then if you pay attention as well to the names of the different pieces that go into an object — like the legs of a chair, the back of chair, the carcass of a cabinet, the face of a clock — all of those things started to feel like these really rich, fertile areas for me to play with. 

What I started doing was just going to the gym, like I said I would, making the object by using all of the functional and design limitations of the medium and of the era but then leaving these certain other aspects blank. So leaving the clock face blank and then coming back to it later on my own time and using that space to basically paint and draw and bring my other practice into it. Essentially, by shifting the clock face or the chair back or the carcass doors, I was able to really create an object that was a blend between figure sculpture and furniture and really started to allude to my experience as a female-bodied person in a wood shop and furthermore within history and within homes and within the American canon. 

It started to have these really interesting ripple effects, but it wasn’t intentional. I think that’s part of why the work is still interesting and powerful to me, that it emerged very organically from an experience that I was having that is relatively universal for female and queer people in spaces like that.

Pier Carlo: What has your practice taught you about yourself that you might not have known had you not dived into woodworking?

Aspen: [She laughs.] I think maybe a silly one, but it’s very real for me as a maker, is that I don’t like to make ... . Basically I decided I wasn’t smart enough to be a painter. I don’t want to make decisions every 30 seconds. Basically the quickest I can make good decisions is once every three, four hours. The nice thing about woodworking is it gives you that time. You have an idea, and then it takes three or four hours minimum. Sometimes it takes a month to make that idea a physical reality, and then you’re off the hook for that whole time. You’re just doing it. You are focusing on the material, how you’re holding the tool, the pressure, the way that the material is coming off and the shape that’s emerging. And then you shift again. You take a step back, and you get to make another decision.

But I didn’t realize that for me I just found it totally overwhelming to be a painter. Man, there’s too many choices. You could tear it in half or bury it, or actually the back is the front now or put it on the ceiling. And I just was like, “I can’t handle this.” It’s like playing chess. Every move changes everything when you’re making a painting, and I found it exhausting.

With furniture, I love the breaks that are built in, and I know that for someone who’s maybe less material-oriented, it wouldn’t feel like a break. My good friends who are painters, they think that my work is a total slog because I have an idea and then it takes me three to six hours to six weeks to see that change happen. They can make that change happen immediately. But for me, I need that break. I need that rest. I think that that’s huge. 

Also, seeing people use it, I think that it also lets me off some hook that I need to be let off of, the whole, “Well, why’d you even make that? What’s the point of that?” I’m like, “Well, even if you don’t love it, you can sit on it. You can definitely put your socks in there, or you can turn it on and read by it.” That’s cool.

Pier Carlo: I want to talk about the work that you’re doing to make sure that underrepresented communities have access to the craft of woodworking. What do you think are the main barriers that make it difficult for an underrepresented person to feel at home?

Aspen: Obviously, it’s a highly personal experience, but if I’m going to pull some throughlines, I would say community access to safe workspaces, so spaces where you can show up as your full self and feel safe. Community would be a step further, so access to spaces where you can show up, be your full and authentic self and find other people who share your experience also working actively in that field.

In addition to all of the barriers that everybody experiences when they try to make furniture, which is honestly a very dumb thing to try to do. It’s just awful.

Pier Carlo: Why?

Aspen: When I think about my friends who are jewelers, their full active professional studio space can be the size of a small bedroom. I remember asking about a certain piece of casting equipment like, “Ooh, what would it cost to get this?” And my friend was like, “Oh, oh, oh, it’s actually really expensive. Probably shouldn’t fall in love with that.” And I’m like, “What is it?” And she said it was $7,000. 

I just laughed because one machine in a woodworking space is $7,000 or more, and then on top of that, the footprint of a machine shop is enormous for a functional machine shop. So not only are you paying 10 or 15 grand for the machine, you’re also going to pay for the footprint of that machine in a space connected to the amount of power it needs for dust collection, for light, for heat, for all of this stuff for the entire time you own it, whether you’re making work with it or not. And not only does it need its space, it also needs an enormous amount of space around it so that you can feed boards in and out and you can move through it with your big pieces and da, da, da. 

And then when you do finish the work, it’s enormously expensive to get it anywhere. You’ve got to build crates and put it on trains. I watch my friends, again, who are jewelers — they’re the ones I’m most jealous of — put $50,000 worth of finished work in a rolling backpack and take it to a craft show. Or the shipping on a $20,000 ring would still only be 50 bucks with all the insurance. So I just am like, “Goddamn, furniture, it’s not a smart thing to do.” 

I think that all of the essential barriers to the field apply to everyone, obviously, but then in addition to that, you have the challenge of not seeing yourself represented. I identify as cisgender. I’m white. There are a lot of things that could make me feel even more distant and isolated from the field of woodworking than just being female and queer, and so when I imagine what I had to overcome in order to visualize myself as a furnituremaker, you can just imagine the number of barriers that other people have to overcome in order to even imagine that that’s something they want to try. Then you add all of the challenges of finding community, finding safe spaces to all of the inherent challenges in the field, and you have a real tough situation.

Pier Carlo: Tell me how you decided to help people knock down those barriers and how your creation, The Chairmaker’s Toolbox, goes about knocking them down.

Aspen: Addressing that specific problem of the physical space and the community, I started making Windsor chairs, which is a really specific not style but process of furniture-making that is entirely hand tools. So say goodbye to your $15,000 machines and their giant space around them and the dust collection and the lights, and say hello to a thing called a travisher and a draw knife, which are all things you could fit in a rolling backpack. Then also the accessibility of the materials, in terms of being able to buy wood at a lumberyard and then split it and rehydrate it and then treat it like greenwood. Or fallen branches or trees that are cut down. As long as you know what you’re looking for, you can find stuff for basically nothing if you know how to process it and you know what you’re looking for.

Windsor chairs are also one of the few furniture forms that don’t require years of practice on the essential skills before you can start designing. It takes years of practice to become a professional Windsor chairmaker, no question. However, the threshold for designing your own work is way lower. I can teach a class for just a few days, and people are already making work that I’ve never seen before, using these techniques.

For me, when I started making Windsor chairs, I felt free because I was like, “Oh, I actually don’t need to find a shop that I feel safe and comfortable in. I can just do this in my backyard.” I ended up finding a shop I feel safe and comfortable in, but knowing that I didn’t need to, that there was a way I could keep doing this work without having to basically put up a shield and go into a space that I didn’t want to be in to do this challenging work, made it so that I was like, “OK, well, regardless of what happens, I can be a furnituremaker. I just might have to engage with the form a little differently than I anticipated.” I started to recognize that this is a way freer and more empowering form of making for somebody who doesn’t have access in the traditional sense of the word.

There’s this amazing award. It’s actually coming up, if you’re an early-in-career furnituremaker! The deadline for the application is September 8th, and it’s called the Mineck. It’s this $25,000 unrestricted grant that goes to one early-in-career furnituremaker every year in the United States. I won it in 2020. It was one of those things that without it I don’t think I would’ve dreamed up The Chairmaker’s Toolbox. I think I would’ve just built chairs with my friends and tried to teach people as I could. 

Sometimes I think awards are silly and isolating and they create this internal hierarchy within the craft that there’s just no need for. But one thing I’ll say that’s good about them is they create this little pocket of space to dream. Whether or not I actually won the award, what it did was it allowed me to sit down for a day and just say, “What would I do if I had this money? What’s the most important thing I could do right now for my field and for my friends and for my community?” And I let myself get kind of mad in a productive way, in the way that you don’t have time to get angry when you’re just trying to live, you’re trying to survive.

And so I sat down, and I was like, “What is wrong with this field? What hurts? What have I grown to tolerate but that I shouldn’t have to?” I started thinking about these types of access, and so I came up with this idea called The Chairmaker’s Toolbox. It’s a three-part project, and it attacks equity and inclusion from a lot of different angles. One of them is free classes. That’s probably the easiest one to understand, just free classes. We have chairmakers all over the country who donate their time to teach these classes, and we’re going to be shifting our focus from those established chairmakers to up-and-coming chairmakers who we can invest in as a teaching cohort to try to teach them to teach.

Pier Carlo: This happens all over the country?

Aspen: Yeah, and we’re actually going international this year. We’ll be in England and Australia this year too. Those are really fun, and they get a lot of attention because there’s a lot of happy people making wild things out of a log, making these hyper-refined chairs out of something that looks like and is a tree, basically. All with hand tools. So it’s very fun. A lot of the time you don’t even want overhead lights on when you’re making chairs because you can see better with raking light from windows than you can from an overhead light. It’s just a really wild, very natural process. 

Then one of the other parts is called The Toolbox, and that’s where we partner with metalworkers who have the capacity to make these really weird hand tools that you need for Windsor chairmaking. We connect them with mentors who can support their toolmaking process. They pick a tool that’s used in the Windsor chair process and that is needed on the market, like a froe. Good luck finding a froe, man! It’s a thing that splits wood in a very specific way. It rives wood so that you can move it from a log to something that you can actually work with, with your hands. We basically say, “These are tools that there’s a great need for in this community, and you, metalworker, may not know that because why would you? Because you don’t make these dorky old chairs.”

We work with metalworkers who are from historically excluded backgrounds and give them an opportunity, if they want it, to design and produce a tool. It’s a very high level for Windsor chairmaking, which I love, because while scholarships are great, they’re like this one-time access, a ticket for one week of getting to participate, whereas what makers who are part of The Toolbox do is they create a tool that gives them paid access to this field forever if they want it. So rather than people granting them space, they’ve earned it, they’re taking it and people are paying them for it. 

Pier Carlo: One thing I love is it encourages craftspeople to reach across disciplines and collaborate on pieces.

Aspen: It’s wonderful. We have another tool that’s about to go live and one that just did. Basically, the process is the metalworker gets matched up with a Windsor chairmaker and they swap prototypes for about a year. They’ll make a piece, there’s a lot of Zoom meetings discussing how the tool works, why it works so well in certain ways and not others, what the essential functional requirements of the object are and what the super-high-end requirements of the object are, and then they start producing and trading back and forth and giving feedback. 

The most recent prototype came from this guy, Fabiano Sarra, who’s making a travisher, which is a curved carving tool used for creating a concave seat out of solid wood. His last prototype came into the shop this week, and my mentor and I both looked at it and made a couple tiny edits and then sent it off. We’ve been working for about a year on that one, or he has been, and we just give advice. 

It’s really exciting to know that he is going to be out there and basically have a way to create a sustainable business that can support whatever other aspects of his creative practice are important to him. So he could make tools part-time, make sculpture part-time. He could never make another travisher again, or he could make exclusively travishers for the next 10 years. Kelly Harris, who made a tapering plane, which cuts angled tendons on legs, has over a year-long waitlist, and she just launched her tool, I think, two months ago.

[She laughs.] There’s a lot of demand for these weird tools. As you can imagine, a lot of the toolmakers that are out there are cisgender straight white men, because that is the demographic that is most commonly seen within the field of Windsor chairmaking. If you’re the person who’s been around, knows what this tool does, and then you consider the smaller cross section of those folks who are going to go ahead and then decide to produce that tool, the likelihood that a queer woman or a BIPOC person are going to end up producing one of those tools is low because it’s just an issue of exposure. So what can we do to make that more accessible to folks who want to try to do it? 

Then the last part is so super-easy to explain. We collect tools from people who are retiring from the craft or who have more than they need and then redistribute them to people who need tools. That’s called The Living Tools Project.

Pier Carlo: Because it must be terrifically expensive to create your studio, right? How long did it take you? You have a story about how you got your tools, right?

Aspen: It’s true, and that story is what started The Living Tools project. 

I started Windsor chairmaking against my better judgment. I just fell in love with the process and was like, “Well, I guess I have to do this now.” I took one class and was hooked, and so I made a five-year plan to buy the hand tools that I needed. That sounds like a long time, but just to put it into context, there’s a 20-year plan to buy all of the machines that I would need in order to be a traditional cabinetmaker. Five years is affordable, especially on a chairmaker’s salary. It takes time to save the money for that thing. 

I was working in my mentor’s shop for a week. I had come to visit — I think I was assisting a class — and a student of his called who was entering hospice. He wanted his chair tools to go to somebody who would use them. My mentor yelled across the shop at me, “Hey, you want some chair tools?” And I was like, “Absolutely.” I didn’t think about it because “some chair tools,” what does that mean? But two days later, a box arrived with every tool I would need to be a chairmaker, and not just any tool but the best version of each one. And I still get ... I’m tearing up thinking about it.

Pier Carlo: So that’s five years compressed into a box one afternoon?

Aspen: Yeah, yeah.

Pier Carlo: Wow.

Aspen: Yeah. You open it up and it’s like, “This is a life for me now, that I didn’t have before.” I had to wait on that life for five years because I had to go to other people’s shops to use their tools. I didn’t have my own. Then I opened up this box, and here it is. 

I immediately called the donor and thanked him and then found myself promising, “I will never sell these. I promise to keep them as a collection, and I will give them away when I can’t use them anymore.” Just to honor the act of generosity, just wanting someone to have them who would use them. And so that’s the one rule of The Living Tools Project: If you receive tools from us, you can’t sell them. You have to give them away as a way to perpetuate that act of generosity throughout generations. Once a tool enters The Living Tools Project, it theoretically stays there forever. So if people make a donation of tools, they are now donated tools in perpetuity. It’s a wonderful project. I don’t know which is the most tear-jerk project of our three projects. I think they all make me cry at different times. But that one, it’s so simple, and it’s so elegant. 

If you’re a woodworker, you know what a sad estate sale looks like or a Craigslist posting where all of a sudden there’s 30 hand planes on a folding table and someone selling them who doesn’t know what they are, doesn’t know what they’re worth, and people are just picking them off like vultures. That’s not how anyone who loves their craft wants to see it end. They want to see those tools go to somebody who appreciates them, who will use them the same way they use them, who will love them the same way they loved them.

A person’s tool collection is also very personal. It’s like a little reflection of your love of the material. Everyone’s tool collection is different because they do different things. Your tool collection is like a little portrait of you and your love of the craft, and so if you can keep it together and let someone else use it in that way, it’s just such a more beautiful way than seeing it scattered to the wind.

Pier Carlo: How do you think the field of contemporary woodworking would change if it were more diverse?

Aspen: Oof! That’s the dream, right, is to see it radically change in exactly that way. I think that you’d start seeing a lot of rewriting of histories, and that’s already happening. Basically the field of furniture and craft was more diverse, and it has become less so. Also the way it was recorded was recorded only from a very white and male perspective, and so people were written out of it who were in it before. So in some ways, first we have to reclaim the history of this field as it actually was before we can even move forward.

Pier Carlo: Was that just because it became much more expensive? Only certain segments of society could afford a bespoke piece? Whereas back in the olden days, that’s all there was.

Aspen: Well, partly. Something that’s made it a lot less accessible as a field for the maker is that now we’re in competition with giant machines that are mass-producing furniture, whereas back in the day, we were not. 

But I think the reason why the history was written the way it was is the same reason all histories are written the way they are. They’re written by the people who are in power. Folks who were making work back in the day came from all different backgrounds. I think at the turn of the century, over 60% of the craft/maker force was Black in the United States, and that’s not the way it is now. And it’s not the way it was recorded. A lot of the furniture that we associate with white culture, because it was in the houses of wealthy white people, was not made by wealthy white people. The act of making and who the makers were and whose hands produced these objects, that history has been erased. 

Then you have something like the type of chairmaking that I’m teaching, which was like vernacular furniture. Farmers made it. They were made out of roots and sticks and whatever they had, and so a lot of that work is simply lost. It’s just gone because it wasn’t preserved in museums, because it wasn’t seen as an important part of history. What gets preserved is as much a reflection of the culture as what is made, and so there’s only pieces of history that we still have. 

So anyway, how I imagine it changing if it became more diverse is … it’s impossible to imagine because of the innumerable ways that people are silenced and excluded at this time. But craft design would become immensely more, I think, playful, joyful, smart. The more minds that you apply to an object in a process, the better it gets. I think of a lot of furniture processes. They weren’t invented by a single person; it’s more like a stone in a river that gets worn down to its simplest, best shape for its context. These processes that I’ve been taught and that I teach, they were refined by hundreds of thousands of people practicing this form and finding slightly better ways to do it over time. 

And so if you open that up and you actually give people access, you allow people to move into spaces that feel authentic for them and processes that feel authentic for them, you suddenly start seeing better, smarter ways of doing what we’re already doing, plus entirely new forms that we haven’t even imagined because we haven’t let people manifest themselves, their cultures, their histories in woodwork.

I can’t wait to see it. Even the little things that happen when we’re teaching Windsor design classes, which are a new thing in the form. People only used to teach a specific chair — the comb back, the continuous arm, the sack back, these old-school pieces from the 1800s. Now we’re teaching design classes where the whole idea is to remove the colonial esthetic and allow people to just see it as a process. It’s like teaching wood carving as opposed to teaching a specific spoon shape. So we teach the Windsor process, not a chair, which then allows people to make anything that they want using that process.