Human culture and experiences are at the core of furniture maker Michael Puryear’s life and work. A graduate of Howard University in Washington, DC, with a degree in anthropology, Puryear has traveled extensively throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, North and South America, and the Arctic. But no culture interests him or has impacted his work as much as his own. One of his significant works, the Dan Chair, now in the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, exemplifies “my pride in being African American and what we’ve contributed to this country.”

A self-taught artisan who lives in the Catskill Mountains in New York, Puryear credits the men of his childhood, including his father, as mentors who “knew their way around tools and took on a variety of home improvement tasks without hesitation,” he told ACC’s American Craft Inquiry in 2019. “It was this can-do attitude that taught me the value of handwork and its satisfactions.” He also traces his attraction to furniture making to an “early awareness and appreciation of the clarity and directness of Shaker and Scandinavian design,” he says, evident in such pieces as his Barrow Chair of bubinga and leather.

His Dan Chair, however, quietly relays histories of African Americans in the US. Named for chairs used by the Dan people of west-central Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and nearby Liberia, Puryear’s piece is constructed of pecan from George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation and poplar from Thomas Jefferson’s slave-maintained Monticello, and burnished in graphite. On the chair’s front legs, Puryear used the technique of ukibori to create raised marks that allude to what he calls “the scars of bondage.” With his critical consciousness and masterful skill, “Puryear creates objects that suggest political and social analysis can be produced with block plane, dovetail saw, mortise chisel, and joiner’s mallet, and that an archive can consist of more than a collection of books and personal documents,” wrote Seph Rodney in American Craft Inquiry.

Puryear’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City; Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina; and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and has been widely published. He’s taught extensively at craft schools throughout the US, as well as at Parsons School of Design and at State University of New York at Purchase. He is a former trustee of the Furniture Society. In 2023, he received the Furniture Society’s Award of Distinction.

michaelpuryear.com

Read more about the other 2024 ACC Awards recipients and honorees here.