Michael Kieley

Michael Kieley grew up in South­ern Cali­for­nia and started build­ing furni­ture with his father at age 7. Making things has been a life­long passion. He loved to make art, even when a couple of teach­ers told him he was a lousy artist. A tipping point in his life was the five years he spent at the exper­i­men­tal archi­tec­ture school, SCI-arc in the late 70s. The school was a bit wild, highly open to new ideas, and focused on project-based learn­ing — in a sense the Black Moun­tain College of its day. With the foun­da­tion, and degrees in Sculp­ture and Psychol­ogy, MK started to teach as soon as he received his B‑arch degree, initially focused on Bauhaus peda­gogy, with rigor­ous study of form and compo­si­tion. Later he created and taught a course called Visual Think­ing: Art and Inno­va­tion at Loyola Mary­mount Univer­sity. Making objects was of contin­ual impor­tance, and his port­fo­lio includes more than four hundred pieces of furni­ture, some focused on func­tions, others on beauty being the only func­tion. MK now lives in Joshua Tree, CA, and is in start-up mode on a non-profit mentor­ing program in studio furniture.