{"id":350028,"date":"2025-12-15T12:11:28","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T12:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/350028\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T12:11:28","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T12:11:28","slug":"frank-lloyd-wrights-forgotten-chair-designs-on-display-at-museum-of-wisconsin-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/350028\/","title":{"rendered":"Frank Lloyd Wright\u2019s forgotten chair designs on display at Museum of Wisconsin Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend is currently showing a first-of-its-kind exhibit<\/a> focusing on Frank Lloyd Wright\u2019s chair designs, which the curators said puts his lesser-known work as a furniture designer in the spotlight after years of being overlooked.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really amazing that so little is known about Frank Lloyd Wright as a furniture designer. He has over 800 pieces of free-standing furniture that he designed,\u201d Eric Vogel, an independent architecture historian and one of the exhibit curators, told WPR\u2019s \u201cWisconsin Today<\/a>.\u201d \u201cAnd yet most of us think of him as an architect, or even a landscape architect or an interior designer, before we think of his furniture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wright, who was born in Richland Center in 1867 and briefly studied<\/a> civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is famous for his pioneering work as an architect. <\/p>\n

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Wisconsin is home to more than 40 houses, churches and other buildings designed by Wright, including Taliesin<\/a>, the sprawling 800-acre property in the Driftless region where he built his home studio and an architecture school.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Wright also left his mark as a furniture designer, bringing his signature touch to more than 200 chair designs over the course of his career.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe has five to six decades of furniture production, starting here in Wisconsin at Taliesin in the years before World War I, that we think established Frank Lloyd Wright as much as a furniture designer as an architect,\u201d Vogel said.<\/p>\n

One reason Wright\u2019s furniture output has been obscured, Vogel believes, is because of Taliesin\u2019s dark history<\/a>. While Wright was away on business in 1914, a handyman at Taliesin killed Wright\u2019s mistress and her two children and set the building on fire. Two workers and a 13-year-old child were also killed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat fire in 1914 and the scandals surrounding it \u2014 the murders, the loss of family, the employees killed \u2014 those very naturally overshadowed, eclipsed, the way that Wright healed from those tragedies. And he healed by working even harder, by rebuilding Taliesin, by experimenting even more,\u201d Vogel said. \u201cSo what we see is iterations at Taliesin of extremely experimental furniture, much of which has been forgotten.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AThis is an original dining room chair for the Hillside Home School, which housed the Taliesin Fellowship in Spring Green. It was created by Wright ca. 1939-1940 and is held in a collection of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, currently on loan to the exhibit. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Wisconsin Art<\/p>\n

Modern recreations of Frank Lloyd Wright\u2019s forgotten chairs<\/p>\n

\u201cFrank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design\u201d takes museum visitors through nearly half a century of Wright\u2019s career, starting with furniture he created for Taliesin right after his Prairie Period<\/a> and ending with a Space Age chair design from 1959.<\/p>\n

The exhibit showcases 30 pieces on loan from more than a dozen museums, archives and private collections, including the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, the Minneapolis Museum of Art and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Also on display are 11 recreations of Wright\u2019s chairs that were lost or unbuilt, newly fabricated especially for the exhibit.<\/p>\n

Thomas Szolwinski, the Museum of Wisconsin Art\u2019s architecture and design curator, and Vogel agreed that the most exciting part of the process was watching Wright\u2019s designs go from concepts on a page or in a photograph to real-life chairs that they could sit in.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cShown together with the historic works, it really tells quite a unique and intriguing story that we wouldn\u2019t be able to tell without bringing those pieces back to life,\u201d Szolwinski said. \u201cWe were learning through doing, which is what Wright did himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most striking of these designs is a chair Wright designed for the cafe of the Guggenheim Museum<\/a> in New York City, which is one of his major architectural achievements. Vogel, a scholar-in-residence at the Taliesin Institute, came across the chair while doing a deep archival dive into Wright\u2019s papers at Taliesin West<\/a> in Arizona.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was incredibly exciting to find those drawings,\u201d Vogel said. \u201cAt the end of the exhibition \u2014 1959, Wright is 92 years old \u2014 we see him create a chair in spun aluminum, a material that I\u2019ve never seen a piece of furniture made from before.\u201d<\/p>\n

To reconstruct the Guggenheim chair, the curators worked with a metal fabricator in Milwaukee. In keeping with Wright\u2019s ethos, they tried to use as much local labor and materials as possible when recreating the chairs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe guys at Butler Metal Spinning<\/a> couldn\u2019t have been better partners, and the chairs that they did for the exhibition are just outstanding,\u201d Vogel said. \u201cThey\u2019re really showstoppers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"TwoFrank Lloyd Wright designed these cafe chairs for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City around 1957. They were fabricated for the first time in 2025 by Butler Metal Spinning out of Milwaukee. Photo courtesy of Wisconsin Museum of Art<\/p>\n

But are they comfortable? Sitting in Wright\u2019s chairs<\/p>\n

For several of the wood chair designs, the curators worked with Stafford Norris from Stillwater, Minnesota, whom Vogel described as a \u201cconsummate craftsman.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe very kindly made one-to-one scale mock-ups out of a soft pine. And we looked at them in absolute detail, to the shadow line,\u201d Vogel said. \u201cAnd, of course, we sat in them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vogel said his favorite to sit in was the Taliesin II armchair.<\/p>\n

\u201cI sat in it, and it fit me perfectly. It has a wide seat, these low, wide arms and a wide horizontal backrest,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd Thomas was sitting in the Ingalls chair, which \u2026 fit his body better. We both looked at one another with these big smiles and said, \u2018How can people complain about Wright\u2019s furniture?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AFrank Lloyd Wright designed this armchair for the James Kibben Ingalls House in River Forest, Illinois in 1909. It was recreated for the exhibit in 2025 by Stafford Norris III out of white oak and upholstered fabric. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Wisconsin Art<\/p>\n

During Wright\u2019s early career, Vogel explained, the cultural norms around sitting in chairs were more formal. Around the dinner table, women would wear corsets and men would be in starched collars.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was decorum and protocols that almost prevented the chair design from being comfort-oriented,\u201d Vogel said.<\/p>\n

But moving out of the Prairie Period, you can see a shift where Wright found a \u201csense of ergonomics,\u201d Vogel said, with chair designs that followed the shape of the spine.<\/p>\n

That said, there is an irony to putting on an entire exhibit about Wright\u2019s chairs: The architect famously hated sitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe chair was a problem for Wright,\u201d Vogel said. \u201cHe thought that sitting was an undignified position, so he searched his whole life for a form of chair that would actually present the human body in a more dignified way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFrank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design<\/a>\u201d is on display at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend through Jan. 25. Szolwinski and Vogel will be giving a curator tour<\/a> on Dec. 26.<\/p>\n

\"AThe exterior of the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend. Photo courtesy of Zak Gruber<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend is currently showing a first-of-its-kind exhibit focusing on Frank Lloyd…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":350029,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1029,228,226,227,690,229,88,473,3],"class_list":{"0":"post-350028","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-culture","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-history","16":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350028\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}