The Collection of Sylvia & Garry Knox Bennett 
27 March 2025
The Collection of Sylvia & Garry Knox Bennett 
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John Cederquist b.1946

White Chair #1

1994
found folding chair, paint, charcoal 29 h × 17 w × 20 d in (74 × 43 × 51 cm)
estimate: $2,000–3,000
result: $1,778
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Signed to seat ‘Cederquist’. Sold with hand-written hanging instructions from the artist.
provenance: Collection of Sylvia and Garry Knox Bennett
exhibited: The Chair Affair, 1994, Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA | The Artist Collects: The Chairs of Garry and Sylvia Bennett, 1998, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA | Dovetailing Art and Life: The Bennett Collection, 23 October 2004 - 16 January 2005, Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco
literature: Dovetailing Art and Life: The Bennett Collection, Museum of Craft and Design exhibition catalog, pg. 24 The Chair Affair, Oakland Museum of Art exhibition catalog, pg. 14 illustrate this example

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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.” 

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Furniture Built Within a Dream

Utilizing a combination of two- and three-dimensional forms, inlaid images, trompe l’oeil painting, and a variety of visual inspiration, John Cederquist crafts what he describes as “furniture built within a dream.” His inventive creations blur the line between reality and illusion and have captivated audiences for decades. 

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