Joyce Lin’s sculptural furniture is a little off. The Alabama-raised, Houston-based artist is best known for making chairs and other furniture forms that straddle the natural, the manmade, the functional, and the conceptual. Aiming to “bypass material limitation through imitation,” Lin uses finely honed woodworking skills to execute her otherwise impossible ideas, layering real and reproduced materials into unlikely forms. The results are as impressive as they are befuddling. “It’s this uncanny element I aim to express in object-making,” says Lin.
In October, the Boston-based Society of Arts and Crafts awarded Lin the 2025 John D. Mineck Fellowship. The $25,000 unrestricted prize—adjudicated this year by woodworker and RISD president emerita Rosanne Somerson, furniture maker and 2017 Mineck Fellowship winner Jack Mauch, and industrial designer and artist Jomo Tariku—is given to an early-career furniture maker to provide “financial assistance to develop skills that move them toward independence.” Securing the fellowship is a powerful way for artists to take their careers to the next level: Lin plans to use her award to expand studio capacity, upgrade equipment, and hire a fabrication assistant.
Joyce Lin.
