Call Me Chairmaker

June 28-Sept. 21, Delaware Art Museum, 2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington, Del., 302-571-9590, delart.org.

by Alicia Puglionesi

Visual Arts

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The Delaware Art Museum should post two very important rules outside its new exhibit: No drinks, and no sitting down.

"Call Me Chairmaker," featuring 52 inventive handcrafted chair-forms by renowned furniture maker Garry Knox Bennett, is a display of studio furniture, not Grandpa's Barcalounger; that sweat-beaded Wawa slushie you're toting might drip on the fine rosewood (not to mention the havoc wreaked by sweat-beaded thighs, but the less said about those, the better).

Don't get the wrong idea, though; just because these chairs are behind the velvet rope at an art museum doesn't mean they're snooze-worthy specimens. Bennett has been called the Hunter S. Thompson of woodworking: His wildly varied furniture hints at an over-the-top personality and an off-the-cuff creative process. "Garry has a very sharp sense of humor," explains Margaretta Frederick, the museum's exhibition curator. "Much of his work spoofs earlier designs."

For arts-and-crafts aficionados who can tell their yellow cedar from their yellow satinwood, Bennett's furniture also offers dazzling technique. "Sometimes people overlook the fact that he's an amazing craftsman," says Frederick, "because he's just breaking all the boundaries." Mere ergonomics fall by the wayside in pursuit of puns as chairs pillage the visual vocabulary of luminaries like Frank Lloyd Wright, as in "Wiggle Wright" (pictured). Frederick calls it "a perfect spoof of the modernist aesthetic. It goes straight to the heart of Wright's style and then literally puts a twist on it." Bennett's antic playfulness makes this the most amusing and elegant bunch of chairs you're likely to encounter, even if you have to stay standing.

June 28-Sept. 21, Delaware Art Museum, 2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington, Del., 302-571-9590, delart.org.