The Collection of Sylvia & Garry Knox Bennett 
27 March 2025
The Collection of Sylvia & Garry Knox Bennett 
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Joe Distefano and Garry Knox Bennett

Side table with tray

USA, 1986
rosewood, mosaic tile 21 h × 29½ w × 19 d in (53 × 75 × 48 cm)
estimate: $1,000–1,500
result: $2,794
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Table features a base by Joe Distefano and removable tray top by Garry Knox Bennett. Incised signature and date to lower edge of table ‘Distefano 1986’.
provenance: Collection of Sylvia and Garry Knox Bennett

This item is subject to CITES regulations. Rago Wright LLC. cannot provide the required documentation needed for export out of the United States; therefore, this item is only eligible for domestic shipping.
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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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