Rosanne Somerson in The New York Times

Let’s here it for the Women Who Lathe

March 5, 2025
By Diana Budds

Ripple Ribbon Table, designed by Rosanne Somerson, former president of the Rhode Island School of Design.

It often starts with a box. These utilitarian objects are expressions of a woodworker’s technical rigor and style. But for Wendy Maruyama, who earned a master’s degree in furniture design from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1980, boxes were also political statements. Early in her career, she created boxes awash in vivid color, perched atop 4-foot-tall stands with spiked handles on their lids. Auction sites frequently describe these pieces as “modesty boxes,” but they started out with a specific use: to hold an 18-pack of tampons.

“I loved the idea of gender-specific furniture — making something that men could not possibly grasp or experience,” Ms. Maruyama, 73, recently said in an email interview. One of the few women in the American studio furniture movement, a cohort that combined fine woodworking skills with artistic expression, she went on to build larger versions that held menstrual pads and sex toys.

Last year, the Fresno Art Museum handed Ms. Maruyama its Distinguished Woman Artist award and hosted her first career survey. No furniture maker before her has received the honor, which has previously gone to the sculptor Ruth Asawa, the assemblage artist Betye Saar and the weaver Kay Sekimachi. In November, the Manhattan gallery Superhouse exhibited her prismatic tambour cabinets in “Colorama,” a show that also included furniture by her friend and fellow woodworker Tom Loeser.'

Ms. Maruyama is not alone in stepping into a gender-specific spotlight. With boundaries dissolving between craft and high art, and women in both areas enjoying a new wave of appreciation, woodworking — which has long been and still remains a male-dominated field — has become more interesting. It is filled with narrative content, social commentary and visually daring forms courtesy of its female makers. Path breakers of the American studio furniture movement who are now in their 70s and 80s are still creating new work, while younger generations of women who learned from them continue to advance the medium.

“Over the years, women are much more likely to be woodworkers or furniture makers or designers,” said Rosanne Somerson, 70, a woodworker who co-founded the Rhode Island School of Design’s furniture design department in 1995 and later became the institution’s president. “With every generation, interests change. My generation had more of a lineage from high-level decorative arts, but women now are bringing in a lot more narrative interest and identity issues; it’s less about the highest levels of craft and more about the highest levels of expression — and almost provocation.”

Read the full article, here.