FS20: Building Place, Shaping Identity, Creating Community has been postponed to 2021.
Thank you for your patience.
The Furniture Society has made the difficult decision to postpone our conference and the Craft for a Greater Good program with a new date in June of 2021.
Thank you to our partners UNC Asheville, STEAM Studios @ The RAMP, and BeLoved Asheville who have generously made accommodations to welcome us next year on the UNCA Campus. We are communicating with presenters to shift the program lineup for FS20 to FS21.
FS20 to FS21 Registration
For those of you who have already registered for FS20, please email: info@furnituresociety.org. Include your name and request one of the following options:
- Request a refund. We understand that some members attend the conference on grants that only apply to this conference, and many, in this time of economic upheaval, need to conserve their money right now. The previous cancellation deadline of Date and Month, 2020 has been voided.
- Apply the registration fee for the 2020 conference to next year’s 2021 conference. The price of this year’s conference will carry over, even if the price of next year’s conference increases. Doing so will help us get through the cash flow challenges we will face.
- Donate the amount paid for your 2020 conference registration to TFS. We will arrange for you to get a tax deductible receipt.
- Make a financial donation whether you had registered for this year’s conference or not. Any amount is helpful! It will immediately be put to good use.
Visit our new COMMUNITY RESOURCES page for continuously updated information for makers, small businesses, educators, and organizations.
Stay tuned for more information about these online experiences, stories, and opportunities.
FS20: Building Place, Shaping Identity, Creating Community
Join us in Asheville as we explore how furniture can be used to foster communities, locally and globally, as well as to strengthen the community of furniture making by recognizing a diverse selection of perspectives, cultural backgrounds, and ideas.
Fundamentally, furniture exists to ready a space for occupancy or use. Its mere presence can signal the purpose of a space or invite a particular action. Its material, form, and surface design reveals a lot about how it is meant to be used, who made it, as well as provide a connection with the past, a culture, or idea. Recognizing the essential role that furniture fulfills in daily life and in society-at-large, the field of furniture wields tremendous potential to have a positive impact worldwide.
UNC Asheville and STEAM Studio in Asheville, NC will be our hosts for this year’s annual conference. In an effort to deeply connect with and serve the communities in which we hold our conferences, we are thrilled to re-introduce the Craft for a Greater Good (CGG) workshop through UNC Asheville’s STEAM Studio. This year, CGG will be partnering with STEAM Studio to make furniture for BeLoved Asheville, a local non-profit building a micro-home village addressing the housing crisis in Asheville. Read more about the project and location HERE.
Look who is opening our conference!
Tanya Aguiñiga
Tanya Aguiñiga is a Los Angeles based artist/designer/craftsperson who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. In her formative years she created various collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop, an artists’ group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art. Her current work uses craft as a performative medium to generate dialogues about identity, culture and gender while creating community. This approach has helped Museums and non-profits in the United States and Mexico diversify their audiences by connecting marginalized communities through collaboration.
For more information about Tanya, please visit her website at http://www.tanyaaguiniga.com/
Photo Credit: Katie Levine