Wendy Maruyama Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1952 -

Wendy Maruyama (born 1952) is an artist, furniture maker, and educator from California. She was born in La Junta, Colorado.

Maruyama was influential in the early period of post-modern artistic furniture. She challenges the masculine environments within the field of woodworking. Her work uses humor, social commentary, sculptural forms, and color to challenge the accepted notions of furniture. Conceptually her work deals with social practices such as her Japanese-American heritage, feminism, and wildlife endangerment in Africa. Maruyama served as the head of the Furniture Design department at San Diego State University for 25 years.


Maruyama is a third generation Japanese-American living in San Diego. She was born deaf in both ears and has worn a hearing aid since nine years old. She studied woodworking at San Diego State University, where she received her BA in 1975. She then studied woodworking at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. She transferred to Boston University's Program in Artistry from 1976-1978, where she studied under Alphonse Mattia and Jere Osgood. In 1980, she was one of the first women, and the first deaf student to complete an MFA at the Rochester Institute of Technology's School for American Crafts in New York.
career


Maruyama taught at the Appalachian Center for Crafts in Smithville, Tennessee from 1980-1985, and served as head of the woodworking and furniture design program from 82-85. She then went on to work as the head of woodworking and furniture design at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California from 1985-1989. After that she was the head of woodworking and furniture design at San Diego State University from 1989-2014.

Early in her career, Maruyama taught at the California State University in Northridge, California in 1970. From 1970 up to present day, she has taught workshops at craft schools including Penland School of Crafts in Penland, North Carolina, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado. Although she has officially retired, Maruyama continues to serve as a mentor for her former students, and is set to teach a workshop at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in the summer of 2017.[citation needed]

Her earliest works in the 1970s were very typical of the style of that time, in which she used visible cabinetmaking skills, compound bent lamination, celebration of complex wood grains and types. Along with Rosanne Somerson and Gail Fredell, Maruyama was one of the first women to break into the field of Studio Furniture. These women responded to the marginalization felt by a male-dominated field by making work that used complex joinery, bent lamination, and technical processes. Maruyama felt restricted by this type of highly technical furniture, and set out to make more expressive works during her time studying at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Believing in the art of furniture making, Maruyama stated "I see furniture as a archetypal object that can also be expressive of the times. Furniture is capable of setting a certain mood and reflecting common ideals in our lives." In her early career she produced 15-20 pieces of furniture a year. She continued to produce about 6-8 pieces every year while of teaching full-time and maintaining other responsibilities. The 1980s was an era of experimentation with forms and aesthetics, using colored surfaces, angular forms, and several mediums. Later in the 80's, Maruyama entered what she describes as a "white period", of "post-nuclear primitive", as an opposition to nuclear testing. These works consisted of pale, white furniture that she imaged would exist after a nuclear holocaust.

Her 1982 piece, Mickey Mackintosh Chair, humorously plays homage to the cartoon character Mickey Mouse, but also speaks to the renown Scottish designers Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh. Maruyama's chair visually alludes to the iconic tall-backed Mackintosh Chair by the twentieth-century duo.

Her work is included in permanent collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, AUS; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC; Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA; Mingei International Museum, San Diego, CA; and the Oakland Museum of Art,[clarification needed] Oakland, CA.

Maruyama had held a studio space in the Glashaus in Barrio Logan in San Diego for many years, until 2017 when the building was sold and renovated.

Maruyama has served as a member of the advisory of the Furniture Society. In 2009, she was inducted into the American Craft Council's College of Fellows for outstanding artistic achievement over her career.