“As a couple well-meaning colleagues and concerned friends told me, taking a detour to teach hand-tool woodworking in a high school English class was a bad idea. Regardless of how enthusiastic I felt about it. I’d be adding even more chaos into the classroom, like tossing another flaming chainsaw to someone on a unicycle already juggling 10 of them. Ask a teacher you know, and they’ll tell you that on any given day, they wear a lot of hats. They pivot between being a public speaker, a cheerleader, a counselor, a lion-tamer, an event planner, a hostage negotiator, a psychological puppetmaster, and (thankfully, not often) a triage nurse. I don’t mean to complain – the unpredictability of my career is...
“Shaker furniture is often misrepresented. Because most collectors and curators only want to show the very best of Shaker design, the same 100 objects are carted around to exhibition after exhibition, printed in book after book. They never exhibit the piece that didn’t work or the ones that were clunky, mis-proportioned, painted an ugly color, too plain, too fancy, too primitive, or too derivative of Victorian fashion, but these are all legitimate Shaker-made objects, too. They served a purpose and were well-used over several generations. This myopic presentation gives the public a skewed perspective on our work that does not do our legacy justice, and it has given birth to the sentimental notion that Shaker craftsmen made chairs laboring under...
