like choosing friends

Photo of Sam Maloof armchair by Jonathan Pollock

There’s a lot of work being done today that doesn’t have any soul in it. The technique may be the utmost perfection, yet it is lifeless. It doesn’t have a soul. I hope my furniture has a soul to it.

Designer/Woodworker Sam Maloof, as cited in Maloof on Maloof, a Smithsonian American Art Museum online exhibition. The self-taught furniture maker Sam Maloof passed away last Thursday at 93.

In a story broadcast on NPR a month before he died Maloof was quoted as saying:

When making furniture, start with the legs: They're like values, principles, beliefs. Choosing the arms is like choosing friends. And the seat keeps you upright, steady and looking ahead toward goals and the future.

The Riverside Art Museum is running a retrospective exhibit of Maloof's work, Grace and Grain, through July 2nd.

job well done.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellows were announced this morning. Each Fellow will receive $100,000 per year for the next five years, no strings attached. The Genius Grant is made "to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work." [1]

This year's Fellows include:
A Fiction Writer
An Urban Farmer
A Rural Family Physician
A Plant Evolutionary Geneticist
A Sculptor
An Infectious Disease Physician
An Astrophysicist
An Anthropologist/Epigrapher (and Mayanist)
A Fiber Artist
A Violinist
A Physicist/Computer Scientist
An Instrument Maker and Composer
A Developmental Biologist
A Geriatrician
A Geomorphologist
A Structural Engineer/Architectural Preservationist
A Critical Care Physician
An Astronomer
A Music Critic
An Historian of Medicine
An Optical Physicist
A Neuroscientist
A Stage Lighting Designer
An Experimental Neurobiologist
A Saxophonist

There's something about this annual role call of extraordinary individuals -- in a world where celebrity culture and its rewards predominate our perceptions of what matters -- that never fails to reassure me that there are good people doing good work that's deeply authentic.

I'm lucky to have met two genius grantees: worked for one; have in my home a stabile (a standing mobile) created by another. Normal folk. Good folk. Solid People. Listeners. Thinkers. Dreamers.

My kind of heroes.



[1] http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.4536879/