April Fool's Furniture

I find pleasure in fooling people.

Thirteen works made during the last two decades by pre-eminent furniture artist John Cederquist are featured at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Art of John Cederquist: Reality of Illusion opened March 31 and continues through August 20.

“John Cederquist is more interested in communicating ideas through his furniture than in celebrating the beauty of woods or fine woodworking techniques,” says Jeremy Adamson, Renwick senior curator and coordinating curator. Cederquist appropriates standard furniture forms—chests of drawers, chairs, benches, tables—using their shapes to execute painterly illusions. In Ghost Boy, replete with painted turned finials and classic broken pediment, Cederquist pokes fun at the stately Colonial American high chest.

The exhibition is based on a retrospective organized by the Oakland Museum of California in 1997.

Source: John Cederquist: Reality of Illusion (press release, Smithsonian American Art Museum, March 9, 2000).

Pictured: John Cederquist, born 1946, Ghost Boy,1992, joined and glued birch plywood, sitka spruce, and poplar with copper leaf, epoxy resin inlay, and aniline dyes, 88 1/4 x 44 1/2 x 15 in., Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Gift of the James Renwick Alliance, Ronald and Anne Abramson and museum purchase.