“A showstopper.” This is how Garry Knox Bennett remembered his first impression of Judy Kensley McKie’s furniture. The encounter occurred in 1979, when both were included in the exhibition New Handmade Furniture at the American Craft Museum (now the Museum of Arts and Design). McKie had only recently started making her signature zoomorphic furniture, and hadn’t yet attained the pneumatic contours that make her work so recognizable. In fact, Bennett was the first studio furniture maker she’d ever met. But he has always had a keen eye, and knew a major talent when he saw one.
Bennett has always had a keen eye, and knew a major talent when he saw one.
It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Though separated by a generation (Bennett was ten years older), three time zones, and a big difference in aesthetic approach, they forged an unbreakable alliance. Garry and his wife Sylvia acquired several important works of Judy’s, one of which—a cupboard with a bold harlequin paint job—bears an affectionate inscription on its back.
Certainly the best thing that Bennett did for McKie was to get her into bronze casting. “Convincing her was not an easy task,” he said. Not until he had taken it upon himself to hand-deliver a component from a table he owned to his friend Piero Mussi, proprietor of Artworks Foundry in Berkeley, and offer to pay for the mold-making costs in exchange for one piece of the edition, did she finally agree.
No matter what the medium, McKie’s forms are witty, precise, and true. She might have had a lot of help in making these wonderful works; but as Bennett put it, “her lines are all her own.”
Unlike Bennett, who had extensive experience with casting, McKie was presumably wary of relinquishing full artistic control. Once she saw the results, though, she was more than convinced. Not only did she have many works subsequently executed by Mussi and his team, but also went on to collaborate with marble carvers and resin casters. No matter what the medium, her forms are witty, precise, and true. She might have had a lot of help in making these wonderful works; but as Bennett put it, “her lines are all her own.”
I love the idea that you can make a useful object beautiful. For me, that’s the ultimate challenge.
Judy Kensley McKie
Garry Knox Bennett was a big man. Big in every way. Tall. Fulsomely bearded. Physically powerful. A veritable Paul Bunyan of furniture, with expansive creativity and curiosity to match. Whatever world he stepped into didn’t quite measure up to him; and so, in the nicest possible way, he had to make it that much more capacious.
Whatever world [Garry] stepped into didn’t quite measure up to him; and so, in the nicest possible way, he had to make it that much more capacious.
That pattern set in early, when, as he put it, “the flower people came to Frisco.” (He was a man of Oakland, with a lifelong suspicion of the fancier sister city across the bay.) Having already gone to art school, initially as a painter and focusing increasingly on sculpture, he now discovered himself as an entrepreneur, starting up a business called Squirkenworks and selling handmade drug paraphernalia at a rapid clip. “God bless the hippies,” he used to say fondly. "They loved anything ugly.”
Judy Kensley McKie b. 1944
Judy Kensley McKie earned a BFA in painting at Rhode Island School of Design in 1966 and turned to furniture-making a few years later out of necessity as she and her husband could not afford to buy any. Though McKie had never set foot in a woodshop during her studies, her father was a woodworker who taught her the basics during her childhood. She drew upon these lessons and began fashioning simple furniture for her home. Friends saw her furniture and requested some of their own, setting McKie on a path toward furniture design and craft.
Throughout the 1970s, McKie honed her skills in workshop settings in and near Boston and taught herself how to carve decorative elements for her creations. She never took a formal class, later admitting “I probably should have.” In the late 1970s, three of her pieces were shown in an exhibition for “new handmade furniture” at the American Craft Museum in New York (now the Museum of Arts and Design) alongside works by Wendell Castle and Garry Knox Bennett. Bennett introduced her to bronze casting via the Artworks Foundry and by the late 1980s she was creating limited editions in the medium.
McKie’s earlier works featured geometric or natural motifs carved into their surfaces but, over time, she began to utilize animal forms as the structures themselves; two dogs might hold up a glass tabletop, or a cat’s long back serves as a bench. Her reliance on recognizable, widely admired forms in combination with her signature visual style imbues McKie’s furniture with a timelessness that has kept her work in fashion for decades. Far from slowing down, the interest in her pieces has only grown and she is now deservedly considered to be among the upper echelon of the American studio furniture movement.
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