The Collection of Sylvia & Garry Knox Bennett 
27 March 2025
The Collection of Sylvia & Garry Knox Bennett 
194

David Ellsworth b.1944

Alamedus Bennuches Mysterious

2002
birch 6¼ h × 7¾ dia in (16 × 20 cm)
estimate: $800–1,800
result: $858
follow artist
own a similar item?
free evaluation

This work was made out of wood from Bennett's house in Alameda, CA. The title is a nod to Bennett's artistic alter ego, Geraldo Bennucci, and Buck was a nickname for Ellsworth.
Incised signature, title and date to underside ‘2002 Buck Ellington Alamedeus Bennuches Mysterious’. Sold with digital copy of correspondence from the artist to Sylvia and Garry Knox Bennett.
provenance: Gift from the artist, Collection of Sylvia and Garry Knox Bennett

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

194