Windsor Arm Chair

Alma's is please to host artist, Aspen Golann and her works, including this Windsor Arm Chair as a part of our Woman Made exhibition running through March, 2022.

Aspen's Windsor Arm Chair is made from White Oak, Hard Maple and Eastern White Pine. It is finished with a double layer of milk paint, the bottom layer is red, the top layer is black.

Aspen Golann is a furniture maker, artist and educator whose work explores gender and power through the manipulation of iconic American furniture forms. Trained as a 17th-19th century woodworker, Aspen engages the moral complexity of reproduction furniture by appropriating the aesthetics and antiquarian processes of early America to illustrate racial, gender and social injustice endemic to the time. She mines the intersections of American furniture practices, sexuality, identity politics and contemporary craft in a range of works including fine furniture and sculpture. 

Aspen maintains an active teaching practice and in 2020, with the help of the Mineck Fellowship, founded The Chairmakers Toolbox—a project that provides free tools, education, and mentorship for BIPOC, NGB and female toolmakers seeking to build sustainable businesses. In support of the project, she has partnered with Winterthur Museum, Fine Woodworking Magazine, A Workshop of Our Own, The Furniture Society and chairmakers around the country.   

Most recently, Aspen has received a Windgate residency in the wood/furniture design program at San Diego State University and a Critical Craft Fellowship at Winterthur Museum to explore the physical and social history of the Windsor chair. 

Trained as a sculptor and 17th-19th century furniture maker, Aspen thinks a lot about history and traditional wooden forms. There is some moral complexity to replicating the styles that adorned the halls of power in the early American period. She often asks: Can their beauty be disassociated with the racism, classism, and misogyny of that time? 

Her response is playful and surprising furniture that explores gender and power by manipulating iconic American decorative art forms. She uses inlay, marquetry, glass enameling and other traditional styles of image making to create contemporary pieces with some humor and classical flair.  

Her line of small scale homewares and utensils mix playfulness and tradition, utility and sculpture. Made using traditional ebonizing techniques, hand tools and brush tying, these pieces have the physical integrity of traditional craft with an updated and playful aesthetic.