Rachel David, To One End, 2023, steel, brass, and bronze with selenite, patina, and wax, 96 × 106 × 24 in. (243.8 × 269.2 × 61.0 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the James Renwick Alliance and museum purchase through the Windgate Foundation Living Artists Acquisitions Fund, 2024.16
It is not every day that museum patrons have the chance to physically rest on artworks while they reflect on them, but a new piece at SAAM's Renwick Gallery invites visitors to do just that.
Ever since receiving the opportunity to curate a “chair gallery” on the Renwick’s second floor, with amazingly unique pieces such as Michael Cooper’s Adirondack chair/functioning go-kart and Vivan Beer’s abstract, curvaceous seat made of steel, I have been the museum’s resident furniture enthusiast. So, I was very excited when I found out that the incredible metalwork artist Rachel David would be creating a functional bench for the museum. To One End, which can now be seen (and sat on) on the first floor, did not disappoint—in fact, it surpassed all my expectations. Looking like something straight out of Game of Thrones, it is visually and technically impressive, but also has an important and profound message.
The artist's assistant, Sachi Nasatir, poses with the in-progress structure of To One End.
After seeing David’s striking metalwork at the Smithsonian Craft Show in 2019, former Renwick Curator-in-Charge Nora Atkinson asked the artist to make us a bench responding to Albert Paley’s iconic Portal Gates, which were commissioned for the Renwick’s gift shop in 1974. David began working on her piece in her studio, an old hay barn in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, in the spring of 2023. About a year later, our mighty team of registrars installed the finished bench (which weighs around 1,000 pounds!) under the Renwick’s donor wall across from the shop.
Inspired by Paley’s conception of a portal, David imagines her bench, with its whimsical form, wing motifs, and gem adornments, as one that can transport the sitter to an idyllic landscape that only exists in dreams. In this place, where, in the artist’s words, “cold water runs all summer and you can swim naked in the gentle pooling waters,” the environment is undamaged by humans and all people are equal and free to express themselves.
With this piece, as with the rest of her body of work, David addresses issues of “body” and “landscape” through the lens of social and environmental justice. The form, with the sheet metal “bursting out from behind the forged patterns,” is a physical representation of restrictive and oppressive social systems and the battle against them. As a woman in the traditionally male-dominated field of metalwork, David aims to promote conversations about these issues and to change the industry—and the wider world—for the better. She not only does this through her own practice, but she is also one of the founding members of the Society of Inclusive Blacksmiths, which supports equity, diversity, and inclusion in the field.
I have already seen that To One End has become a space of rest and reflection for visitors to the Renwick. I hope that it will enable some of these visitors to think and talk about the ideas that the bench evokes, along with the many important ideas raised by other pieces at the museum. And maybe, just maybe, it will inspire someone to try a new craft or skill they didn’t think they could try before.
Elana Hain is collections manager at SAAM's Renwick Gallery.
