Ken Web page, Director of Wendell Fort Workshop, is sharing a considerate group of newly revealed photos that supply a more in-depth, extra private take a look at how Wendell Fort labored and thought. Wendell’s sketches and course of materials was donated by Fort’s widow, Nancy Jurs, to the Wendell Fort Venture (the father or mother group of Wendell Fort Workshop) the pictures hint his concepts from early research to completed items, highlighting a profession outlined by curiosity and fixed experimentation.
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One of many earliest photos dates to the late Fifties, when Fort was a pupil on the College of Kansas, incomes a BA in Industrial Design and a grasp’s diploma in Sculpture. Proven alongside the completed Sherling Coat on Coat Rack, the drawing hints at how early he started treating furnishings as sculpture. Even then, Fort was much less curious about conventional varieties and extra centered on exploring expressive shapes and construction.
The above picture focuses on Fort’s 1988 fee for Steinway & Sons, created to have fun the corporate’s 500,000th piano. The sketches for the Steinway 500K reveal his cautious steadiness of kind and which means, displaying how he approached high-profile commissions with the identical hands-on, exploratory mindset he dropped at his studio work.
This additionally consists of materials from the 2000s, when Fort started folding digital instruments into his well-known stack-lamination course of. He continued to attract by hand and carve scale fashions from signal foam, shaping them manually earlier than having them digitally scanned and sliced into exact layers. The pictures seize a second when know-how expanded his prospects with out changing the bodily making that remained central to his apply.
Rounding out the choice is a steel chair constructed from laser-cut metal “amoeba” shapes that have been welded collectively: a reminder that Fort labored comfortably in wooden, steel, and fiberglass. Wendell Fort Workshop provides metalworking programs for that reason.
Beneath are extra of sketches of his work:
