Joshua Enck is a sculp­tor, designer, drafts­man, and illus­tra­tor who teaches and main­tains an active studio prac­tice in Rochester, New York. He trained as an archi­tect and a furni­ture designer, receiv­ing his MFA in furni­ture design from the Rhode Island School of Design and his BSAS from the School of Archi­tec­ture at the Univer­sity of Illi­nois. He taught for ten years at RISD: drawing, three-dimen­sional design, tech­ni­cal drawing, wood­work­ing, and metal­work­ing. He has also taught wood­work­ing at the Ander­son Ranch Arts Center and drawing at the Univer­sity of Illi­nois, Williams College, and the Univer­sity of Rochester. Joshua has exhib­ited his work in solo shows at Simon Gallery, the Univer­sity of Maine Museum of Art, and Space Gallery. The Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston, and the Center for Art in Wood in Philadel­phia have honored his work. Joshua recently returned from five months in India as a Fulbright Nehru Scholar, research­ing tradi­tional metal­smithing and teach­ing at the Sushant School of Design.

website
@joshuaenck

Wu Hanyen is a Taiwanese Amer­i­can wood­worker and maker based in Prov­i­dence, RI. Their prac­tice centers on the craft of every­day objects and making things by hand. Wu spent five years working as a produc­tion furni­ture maker in New York City before earning an MFA in Furni­ture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. They are now an Asso­ciate Profes­sor in the 3D Arts Depart­ment at Mass­a­chu­setts College of Art and Design.

Website

For more than two decades, Deirdre Visser — queer writer, artist, and curator based in San Fran­cisco — has pursued oppor­tu­ni­ties to make visible unheard or too-long buried stories with the goals of nour­ish­ing discourse across differ­ence, build­ing commu­nity, and advanc­ing civic partic­i­pa­tion. As Curator of the Arts at CIIS, she devel­oped an exhi­bi­tion and publi­ca­tion program ampli­fy­ing the work of emerg­ing and mid-career artists, focused partic­u­larly on under­rep­re­sented voices. Then in 2019 Deirdre co-curated with Laura Mays the largest ever exhi­bi­tion of women wood­work­ers, Making a Seat at the Table, which opened at the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadel­phia that fall. Rooted in the same research, in 2022 she published the first ever history of women and gender non-confor­m­ing makers in wood, Joinery, Joists and Gender: A History of Wood­work­ing for the 21st Century. Today she is Curator of Applied Tech­nol­ogy at the Randall Museum in San Fran­cisco and she contin­ues to write at the inter­sec­tion of labor history and wood.

www​.deirdrevisser​.net/

www​.artsatciis​.org

Joinery, Joists and Gender: A History of Wood­work­ing for the 21st Century