An Artist's Chair
The Chair:
A Seat of Memory and Meaning
In the Fall of 2024, I taught an all-media course titled The Chair at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. The course wasn’t about designing chairs in the traditional sense,
but about exploring them as vessels of history, culture, materiality, placement, and presence —individually and collectively. In my public art practice with Lajos Héder, we’ve often integrated seating into large-scale landscape projects — from miles of canal paths to stretches of highway.
For us, a chair isn’t just an object; it’s an invitation. A way to pause, reflect, and inhabit a space more fully. In many ways, this course extended that thinking into more personal terrain.
The idea for this show took root during a visit to my friend and former studio mate Joel Janowitz. In his studio sat a chair he’s had since the early 1970s — a beat-up, duct-taped, upholstered office chair that has followed him through four studios and two cities for over 50 years.
These small scaled relics are next to photos of the artist in their studios. paired with short interviews accessible via QR codes. The stories are brief but poignant; each chair a portal into a life of making.
Not all chairs made it here are 3D prints: Ellen Rich used her actual chair.
Gerry Bergstein’s couch was too large (and too heavy to move down four flights of stairs), so it was scanned with an iPhone and printed on a school printer. I gave Gerry a challenge to make this 3D print his own. He added a junk of paint off his
palette and placed a surrogate seated Gerry immersed in this world.
We all live among objects. Some hold meaning, some gather dust. These chairs are more than just furniture — they are safe havens, launch pads, memory keepers. They are spaces within spaces, anchoring us while we drift into imagination.
- Mags Harries
--------------
Photo cutline of Mags' picture: Mags Harries in the gallery. 3D print of Joel Janowitz's red chair is in the foreground.
