Tom Loeser

Loeser was born in 1956 in Boston, MA. He received his BFA from Boston University’s Program In Artisanry and his MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. He is especially interested in functional furniture that plays on the edge of function and dis-function, often designing and building functional objects that are challenging to use and demand intelligent interaction from the user. He has also been an educator. He served as Chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Art from 2009-2014 and was head of the wood/furniture area at UW-Madison from 1991-2020. Loeser has maintained his own independent workshop-based practice since 1982 and he currently maintains a woodshop on Madison’s fabulous East Side.

Loeser designs and builds one-of-a-kind functional and dysfunctional objects that are often carved and painted and always draw inspiration from the history of design and object making. In addition to producing studio furniture, Loeser has also worked on a number of public commissions and site-specific installations. He collaborated with his wife, Bird Ross, on the design and fabrication of the highly kid-friendly, very interactive, and not at all traditional reception desk for the Madison Children’s Museum. Loeser worked with willow furniture maker Dave Chapman and built three large willow and steel pod forms that are permanently installed reading retreats in the children’s section of the new downtown public library in Madison. In 2019 he completed a set of seating areas for the new Pinney Branch Library using Ash wood from trees that had fallen victim to the Emerald Ash Borer beetle. In 2023 he completed an additional bench for the public library-this one based on traditional Adirondack outdoor chairs.

Loeser received 4 Visual Artist Fellowship Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a National Endowment for the Arts/Japan-United States Friendship Commission/Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunka-cho), Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship for 6 months research in Japan. His work can be found in museum collections including the Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Fine Arts-Boston; Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin; Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, Washington, DC; Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, and other institutions.

Topics / Strengths:
Overall thinking about how to structure a career and how to develop body of work

@tomloeser