Robell Awake’s chairs are skillfully handmade with great reverence and appreciation for the work and techniques of under-recognized Black craftspeople throughout history. Awake continues a rich tradition of updating the ladder back chair, using inlaid materials and carved patterns rife with meaning and relevance.
Six new chairs are replete with allusions to spiritual practices, echoing historically sacred imagery calling for divine healing and protection. They feature carved faces, symbols, and creatures drawing from various talismanic practices of the African diaspora. Patterns of eyes reference a 2000-year-old tradition of Ethiopian magic scrolls, custom protective scrolls prescribed by healers combining sacred symbols with written prayers. Imposing faces with bared teeth are reminiscent of Edgefield face jugs, face-shaped ceramic vessels made by enslaved potters in South Carolina. Awake’s use of meaningful objects for protection alludes to a deep history including Hoodoo and Conjure, magical traditions in which spiritual power is invoked for healing and self-defense, and African American yard shows, an assemblage tradition going back generations. The yard shows of America’s Black Belt, ambitious outdoor art installations where ordinary materials are sanctified, reflect the resilience of people using the materials at hand to express themselves.
With these new chairs, Awake is exploring the spectral nature of our digital lives with inlaid cords, cables, and arrangements of zeroes and ones from bygone numerical systems, embedding the language of the virtual into the physical. Concerned with the fragility of identity formation online, he examines the precarity of our digital selves—simultaneously fabricated and highly visible. His chairs become talismanic objects, crafted not just as functional seats but as protective wards in the digital realm. By merging traditional craftsmanship with symbols of the online world, Awake transforms everyday furniture into sacred artifacts, offering a tangible anchor in an era where identity is often elusive, overdetermined, and over policed.
Awake’s process is rooted in pre-industrial technique, relying on hand tools and working with green (or unprocessed) wood. He begins by splitting whole logs—primarily oak, with hickory used for the rungs. After carving the backs and legs, he adds intricate visual details, incorporating line drawing and relief carving, which are then painted to highlight the textures and forms.
Awake’s work centers Black aesthetic traditions and histories, creating objects that are both deeply rooted and radically forward-looking. By intertwining traditional modalities with contemporary anxieties about the digital self, he highlights the ways in which technology both connects and destabilizes us as well as the countries that bear the brunt of resource extraction and technological production. His chairs serve as bridges between past and present, between tangible heritage and intangible existence, urging us to consider how we ground ourselves in an increasingly spectral world. They embody the weight of history while addressing the urgent realities of our present—an era of collapsing empires and ecological crisis, in which both people and the planet are endangered. By merging ancestral practices with contemporary concerns, Awake’s talismanic chairs serve as acts of resistance and resilience, grounding us in traditions of survival, expression, and protection.
The exhibition’s title, Human Resources, is a pointed nod to the insidious nature of the term, which reduces people to mere assets to be managed, extracted, and exploited—an unsettling parallel to the historical and ongoing commodification of labor, identity, and even digital existence.
Human Resources will be on view through June 7, 2025.
Robell Awake is a recipient of the Center for Craft’s Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship and has taught at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Penland School of Craft, and the Woodworking School at Pine Croft. He has presented at the Furniture Society, Warren Wilson College, Berea College, Washington College, and the North Bennet Street School. Awake was recently selected as one of the Dwell 24, Dwell magazine’s awards for the best emerging designers from around the world. His recent book, A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects, published through Princeton Architectural Press (2025), features ten illustrated essays on handcrafted objects and their makers, providing invaluable insight into Black history and craftsmanship, and was the subject of an exclusive segment on National Public Radio. His work is included in important public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, and he is producing a forthcoming commission for the Baltimore Museum of Art.
