Art With a Purpose

Golann in front of the tool wall at her shop in North Carolina before moving to New Hampshire. “The wall looks exactly the same,” she says. “I take it with me everywhere I go.” Photo by Lucy Plato Clark

Aspen Golann has always been the creative type. In her youth, she became fluent in drawing and painting at a very young age. In her later years, she continued to hone her skills by pursuing everything from weaving and sculpting to fine art and conceptual art. “I got started with art before I got started with furniture-making,” says Golann.

Her first introduction to furniture-making was a class she took, called “Art with a Function,” at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. For Golann, it was also her first introduction to three-dimensional art. Although she did not know it then, the inspiration she drew from that class had planted a seed in her that would take creative root many years later.

A clock Golann made in the style of Eli Terry and 18th-century American furniture, featuring a hand-painted glass enamel panel. She says that “the imagery reinterprets traditional motifs to explore gender and power in early America.”
Photo by Lance Patterson

After college, Golann pursued a career as a high school art teacher. “I loved my job as a teacher,” she says. However, the maker in her always yearned to work with her hands.

Although Golann’s talent could have taken her in many different directions, a chance encounter with a former high school teacher would change the trajectory of her life forever. Recalling the conversation, Golann says, “He asked how I felt about teaching. I said I loved it. He asked if I could see myself doing it five years from now.” The question gave her pause. “I just imagined myself in a wood shop,” she says.

At 29 years of age, after seven years of teaching and no furniture-making experience, Golann decided to take a leap of faith. She quit her job and enrolled at Boston’s North Bennet Street School (NBSS), earning a certificate in Fine Furniture & Cabinetry in 2018.

Golann says a big part of what held her back from pursuing furniture-making in the past is that it was difficult to imagine that she could succeed as an underrepresented female in the field of woodworking. Had she not felt stable enough in her teaching career, “I would not have taken that risk,” she says. She knew she could always go back to teaching if all else failed.

While at NBSS, she learned the tools and techniques of traditional woodworking but wasn’t afraid to push up against boundaries and instill her own voice in her work. Many of the furniture pieces she created are intended to foster critical conversations about the gender and social injustices endemic during the 18th and 19th centuries that influenced furniture-making back then.

Haniel and Grace doing a dry fit, a critical step before gluing, to ensure everything comes together properly. Photo by Aspen Golann

Shortly after graduation, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Golann also began making smaller pieces, like brushes and brooms, adding to them sculptural flare. Golann says that, while she loves making brushes and brooms because they are truer to her “chaotic, playful instinct,” her favorite things to make are chairs, “because of the combination of how fun they are to make with how beautiful their lives are after the fact.”

“Once the brushes that I make leave my studio, they live a much shorter life. They sit on shelves most of the time, whereas when I am done with the chairs, they have only just begun existing.”

In the end, Golann’s career did take her back to teaching but not by necessity. Today, she shares her knowledge as an award-winning furniture-maker with students around the country and the world. Her teachings have taken her to Asia, Australia, Canada and Europe. Being in a craft that is often quite isolating, it’s an ironic juxtaposition that connections between small subsets of people in super niche crafts “take you places that you would not otherwise go,” she says.

Golann is also an advocate of sharing knowledge to help foster diversity in the field of woodworking. As she progressed further into her furniture-making career, she was struck by the fact that it was getting less and less diverse. This was the inspiration behind founding The Chairmaker’s Toolbox. With the help of an initial grant from the Mineck Fellowship in 2020, The Chairmaker’s Toolbox has blossomed into a nationwide initiative that fosters diversity, equity and inclusion in the field of chair-making.

Kevin laying out an arm bow to determine the best drilling angles for spindle placement. Photo by Aspen Golann

She notes that the beauty of learning Windsor chair-making, in particular, is that anybody can do it in their backyard with just a few hand tools and logs that can be split, carved and shaped. It doesn’t require electricity or power tools.

Golann’s own training in Windsor chair-making was inspired by her mentor, New Hampshire chairmaker Peter Galbert, whom she met while he was a guest lecturer and instructor at NBSS. Galbert is among the many chairmakers across the country that volunteer their time to The Chairmaker’s Toolbox to teach traditional woodworking techniques to students historically excluded from the field of chair-making. Classes are held where space allows, including community wood shops, private studios and other donated spaces provided by higher education partners.

A related initiative started by Golann, “The Living Tools” program, provides new makers with free tools donated by retired makers. The only rule is that the recipient must never sell the tools. “You have to give them away in the spirit they were given, so it becomes a gift in perpetuity,” Golann says.

Golann’s career continues to blossom. The recipient of dozens of prestigious honors and awards, she is currently curating a piece for the “Please Be Seated” program for Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which since 1975 has commissioned contemporary artists to make benches and chairs for the museum for use by its guests. Symbolically, it is the one piece that will become a gift in perpetuity to Golann herself, because, as she says, “Most of the work I make, I never see again.”