The Collection of Sylvia & Garry Knox Bennett 
27 March 2025
The Collection of Sylvia & Garry Knox Bennett 
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Garry Knox Bennett

Bronze Table #12, pair

USA, 1988, 2012
patinated cast bronze, aluminum, yellow satinwood, Fountainhead 24 h × 24 w × 22 d in (61 × 61 × 56 cm)
estimate: $3,000–5,000
result: $3,810
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Incised signature, date, number and inscription to the leg of one example ‘In Oakland GKB Anno 012 2/12’. Incised signature, date, number and inscription to leg of additional example ‘In Oakland GKB Anno 88 A/P’. These examples are an artist's proof apart from the edition of 12 and number 2 from the edition of 12.
provenance: Collection of Sylvia and Garry Knox Bennett
literature: Made In Oakland: The Furniture of Garry Knox Bennett, American Craft Museum exhibition catalog, pg. 63 illustrates one example

print

Larger Than Life: Garry Knox Bennett

by Glenn Adamson

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.” 

read the full essay

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