Rocking Chairs Are Art In Sam Maloof’s Hands

When thinking of art, rocking chairs don’t usually come to mind.  The number of cheap, scratchy rocking chairs often found in a neighborhood is usually too high for them to be taken as art.  Antiques, maybe, such as the outdoor rocking chairs that have gone in and out of style a few times and have value based partly on appearance and partly on age, but rarely do they seem to be art.  What most people are missing out on, however, is the wooden rocking chairs made by Sam Maloof.  Those count as art, pure and simple, even though Maloof never accepted the term artist, and preferred to be called a woodworker his entire life.

Maloof was born in Chino, California and first showed amazing promise with woodworking in his high school woodworking class.  He worked in the art department of a California company called Vortox Manufacturing before joining the army for world war two.  After coming back from that, he set up a workshop in his garage to build furniture for his house out of salvaged parts. From there, he went on to build many famous pieces of furniture.

They are located in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  The Smithsonian put him down as the “The Hemingway of Hardwood” and remarked that he was the most renowned of American contemporary furniture craftsmen.  He also received various awards, such as the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant. He never really liked to be called an artist, however, and always put simply ‘woodworker’ on his business cards.

His rocking chairs are famous for being smooth and full of curves. Both Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter had Maloof rocking chairs, and his works have gone on to inspire thousands of woodworkers since then.  When Maloof died at the age of ninety-three, many people were sad to see him go.