‘The Art of Seating’ leaves viewers with new appreciation for design
By Liz Reichart, A&E Editor //
The chair; it seems so common that we don’t even give a second thought to the marvel that it truly is. The innovation and detail that goes into today’s chairs is inescapable.
Chairs are everywhere and for good reason: they continue to be the cross-section of function and style. “A chair’s function is not just to provide a place to sit; it is to provide a medium for self-expression. Chairs are about status, for example. Or signalling something about oneself. That’s why the words chair, seat and bench have found themselves used to describe high status professions, from academia to Parliament to the law,” says English economist and journalist Evan Davis.
The Art of Seating exhibition at the HPU Sechrest Gallery glorifies these very ideas. The university’s School of Art & Design is hosting this display of innovative student and faculty chair designs from October until Dec. 1. The exhibit is on display in conjunction with the Reynolda House Museum of American Art’s special exhibit, “The Art of Seating: Two Hundred Years of American Design.” The Reynolda House Museum of American Art located in Winston-Salem houses a collection of American art ranging from the colonial period to the present.
The 40 plus iconic chairs featured at the museum provide a point of reference for the chair prototypes and ideation designed by our own students and faculty at High Point University.
The production of the range of chairs has served as a learning tool for HPU classrooms. Design students have learned to combine their original designs with new technologies to bring an original idea to prototyping, manufacturing and global marketing. Students have followed every step of the process, from paper to a tangible product.
Above: “Distillation Welded Steel” by Adrian Boggs and Faculty. Below: Arc Rocker made from Plywood, copper, zinc, and bronze by Brandon Jones. Photos by: Kelly Schwab
What value do these experiences give design students? Outside the classrooms, furnishings and product designers consider different factors, like limited resources, material life cycles, aesthetics and product placement to attract a targeted customer, all of which design students were challenged to consider.The Art of Seating provides a platform for displaying, critiquing, and contextualizing the work of faculty and student designers. The Art of Seating is something worth clearing your schedule for. The work of students and faculty is astounding and you’ll leave with a brand new appreciation of what it means to have a “craft” and be a “craftsman” of furniture.