Adam Manley

Adam John Manley is Associate Profes­sor of Furni­ture Design and Wood­work­ing at San Diego State Univer­sity and has taught full time at Maine College of Art and UMass Dart­mouth. He has also taught exten­sively at Haystack Moun­tain School of Craft, at Penland School of Craft, and at Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Adam has done resi­den­cies at UW Madison, where he was the Windgate Artist in Resi­dence, the Haystack Open studio Resi­dency, the Museum for Art in Wood, and the Lanes­boro resi­dency in South­ern Minnesota. Adam sat on the board of directors for the Furniture Society, and served as board president from 2020-2022. He is currently also on the board of the Emma International Collaboration, a Saskatchewan Canada-based non-profit that hosts a biennial collaborative residency event in northern Saskatchewan.

Adam has devel­oped a unique voice that blends func­tional construc­tion method­olo­gies, mate­r­ial explo­ration, and a focus on the concep­tual poten­tial embod­ied within craft, furni­ture, and func­tional famil­iar objects. Adam has taught at numer­ous insti­tu­tions, from colleges to craft schools, and contin­ued to develop his ideas and work in an ever-evolv­ing way. Adam’s work has addressed issues relat­ing to our unique sense of place and how famil­iar func­tional objects link us to that sense, humor, indi­vid­ual and univer­sal rela­tion­ships to furni­ture, and, more recently, the rela­tion­ship between furni­ture and the histor­i­cal objects used to inflict violence on others through­out time. Adam has exhibited his work nationally and been part of events and exhibitions related to "World Wood Day", an event hosted by the International Wood Cultures Society, in both Nepal and Cambodia. Adam is the co-founder, along with colleague Keri­anne Quick, of the contem­po­rary craft zine/journal, CRAFT DESERT, a publication which is nationally recognized in the field. That collaboration has also yielded a successful national exhibition of over 60 artists from across the country at City Gallery, in the Spring of 2022, and will continue to morph into more ambitious projects and events.

IG: @adamjohnmanley

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