Celebrating the First Half Century of a Master Woodworker's Life
Celebrating the first half century
of a master woodworker's life
It is safe to say that David N. Ebner was born to
work in wood. Among his earliest recollections—
as recounted in a new book on his work—are the
hours spent in his father’s workshop, where, by
the age of nine, he had made his own
baseball bat. Beginning in 1964, as
a student at Rochester Institute of
Technology’s School for American
Craftsmen he studied with Wendell Castle
and William Keyser and began to identify
himself as an artist-craftsman.
Not quite fifty years later, Philadelphia’s
Moderne Gallery is mounting a major retrospective
of Ebner’s work. The exhibition,
which opens April 25, includes
more than sixty chests, stools, chairs,
mirrors, desks, benches, and consoles
that, taken together, paint a
portrait of the designer’s craft. Robert
Aibel, the founder of Moderne and a leading expert in
the American studio furniture movement, has represented
Ebner for more than a decade. “He forged a style of his own
from the very beginning and has never allowed himself to
stop evolving,” Aibel writes in his foreword to the lively and
wide-ranging newly published David Ebner: Studio Furniture,
by Nancy N. Schiffer. “It is exciting to present David’s sculptural
furniture as he is constantly developing his own ideas
and styles in fascinating ways, Aibel says.”
Ebner likes to call his designs “antiques of the future.”
Because he often draws on traditional forms but remakes
them in a thoroughly contemporary way, he sees them as
“classical impressions” in which he relies on the forms of
the past but removes the embellishments.
His work, most often in fine hardwoods, melds sculpture
and furniture, art, and craft. It is sometimes graceful
and delicate and sometimes far sturdier and more forceful.
His Twisted Sticks series from the mid-1990s incorporates
naturalistic forms drawn from his observations of the way
honeysuckle vines wrap around themselves. His scallionand
onion-inspired chests and coat racks (he says they are
among his favorites) are at once witty and timeless. His elegant,
highly articulated Sternum series—it includes both
a music stand and a dictionary stand along with tables and
chairs—was inspired by looking at the bones of a duck he
had eaten for dinner. Although he is versatile, his most
recognizable pieces usually stand on improbably slender
splayed legs and have precise joinery.
A dovetailed joint stool he made shortly after settling
in Eastern Long Island (first in Blue Point, then
Brookhaven, and finally Bellport) was selected for the
1975 exhibition Craft Multiples at the Renwick Gallery
of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and
was later selected for the museum’s collection. Dated
1974, it is now known as the Renwick Stool and signaled
the start of Ebner’s success and recognition. Another
1974 piece, a rocking horse made of carved Douglas fir
and German yellow pine, was selected for the juried exhibition
Bed and Board at the deCordova Museum in Lincoln,
Massachusetts.
Moderne’s exhibition, entitled David N. Ebner: 50 Years
of Studio Furniture, traces all this and much more. It runs
through June 30. modernegallery.com
– Beth Dunlop