The American Association of Woodturners (AAW) is the principal organization in the United States supporting the art and craft of woodturning. It is sometimes stylized as American Association of Wood Turners (AAW). [1] Established in 1986 [2] and headquartered in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the organization encompasses more than 15,000 members in the United States and many foreign nations. As of 2013, the AAW was affiliated with nearly 350 local chapters worldwide. [3] In addition to sponsoring an annual national symposium, the AAW provides support to local clubs for outreach and education. The 25th anniversary of the AAW was celebrated in 2011 at the annual symposium held in Saint Paul. Phil McDonald is executive director of the organization.
The AAW states: "Our purpose is to foster a wider understanding and appreciation of lathe-turning as a traditional and contemporary craft and a form of art among the general public and amateur, part-time, and professional woodturners. This will be accomplished by providing education, information, organization, technical assistance, and publications related to woodturning." [4]
Woodturning, which has experienced exceptional growth and interest since AAW's founding, is a pursuit that goes back 4,000 years in human history – using craft's most organic material, wood, as its primary medium. Woodturners create utilitarian, artistic, and sculptural wooden objects on mechanical lathes. The craft differs from most other forms of woodworking in that the wood stock rotates rapidly while sharpened cutting skews, gouges, and other tools are maneuvered by hand to shape the material.
Membership in AAW brings a variety of benefits, including a bimonthly magazine, insurance coverage, scholarships, national symposiums, educational opportunities for newcomers and youth, and a website where turners can display and market their woodturnings.
The AAW was founded at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and remains closely affiliated with that institution, as well as with the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, and the Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village, Colorado.
The AAW, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization, is administered by a nine-member Board of Directors, all volunteers who serve three-year terms. Three board members are elected by the full membership each year and begin their terms in January. The Board employs an executive director and an editor, and appoints a Board of Advisors along with various committee members serving specific purposes, such as organizing the national symposium and overseeing AAW financial grants to clubs and individuals.
The AAW magazine, American Woodturner, is published in print and online editions six times a year. Subscriptions to the journal are included with AAW membership, and individual copies are available on newsstands. Members may view all issues online. The publication contains articles aimed at both novice woodturners as well as intermediate craftspersons and professionals.
The AAW is affiliated with more than 350 local chapters, or clubs, and three "virtual" chapters. [5] Local chapters are primarily in the United States but encompass groups in many other nations, including Canada, England, New Zealand, Taiwan, Australia and Japan. Virtual chapters are not geographically based but are organized around specific woodturning techniques. The three virtual chapters include the Ornamental Turners International, Segmented Woodturners, and Pen Turners www.principallypens.com. Ornamental woodturners specialize in the use of an ornamental lathe such as the Rose engine lathe. Segmented woodturning involves joining individual pieces of wood together prior to turning to create intricate patterns and dramatic visual effects. Pen turners specialize in making pens and other writing instruments out of both wood and synthetic materials.
Each year an annual Symposium take place. They have been sponsored and organized by the AAW each year since 1987, alternating in cities around the United States. The first symposium was held in Lexington, Kentucky in 1987. The gathering typically includes live presentations, an auction of selected woodturnings, an instant gallery that showcases current woodturning craft, a rotation of how-to and hands-on demonstrations, the world's largest trade show of commercial woodturning vendors, and a youth training center.
Year | City |
---|---|
1987 | Lexington, KY |
1988 | Philadelphia, PA |
1989 | Seattle, WA |
1990 | Gatlinburg, TN |
1991 | Denton, TX |
1992 | Provo, UT |
1993 | Purchase, NY |
1994 | Fort Collins, CO |
1995 | Davis, CA |
1996 | Greensboro, NC |
1997 | San Antonio, CA |
1998 | Akron, OH |
1999 | Tacoma, WA |
2000 | Charlotte, NC |
2001 | St Paul, MN |
2002 | Providence, RI |
2003 | Pasadena, CA |
2004 | Orlando, FL |
2005 | Overland Park KS |
2006 | Louisville, KY |
2007 | Portland, OR |
2008 | Richmond, VA |
2009 | Albuquerque, NM |
2010 | Hartford, CT |
2011 | St Paul, MN |
2012 | San Jose, CA |
2013 | Tampa, FL |
2014 | Phoenix, AZ |
2015 | Pittsburgh, PA |
2016 | Atlanta, GA |
2017 | Kansas City, MO |
2018 | Portland, OR |
2019 | Raleigh, NC |
2020 | Canceled (COVID-19) |
2021 | Canceled (COVID-19) |
2022 | Chattanooga, TN |
2023 | Louisville, KY |
2024 | Portland, OR |
The AAW operates the AAW Gallery of Wood Art www.galleryofwoodart.org in Saint Paul's historic Landmark Center. The gallery features changing exhibits of art of all kinds made from wood, and there also is a gift shop. Admission is free to the gallery, which is open daily except Monday and Saturday. The AAW works in partnership with Collectors of Wood Art to promote the development and appreciation of studio wood art among collectors, artists, educators, art critics, galleries, museums, and the general public.
A lathe is a machine tool that rotates a workpiece about an axis of rotation to perform various operations such as cutting, sanding, knurling, drilling, deformation, facing, and turning, with tools that are applied to the workpiece to create an object with symmetry about that axis.
Woodturning is the craft of using a wood lathe with hand-held tools to cut a shape that is symmetrical around the axis of rotation. Like the potter's wheel, the wood lathe is a simple mechanism that can generate a variety of forms. The operator is known as a turner, and the skills needed to use the tools were traditionally known as turnery. In pre-industrial England, these skills were sufficiently difficult to be known as 'the misterie' of the turners guild. The skills to use the tools by hand, without a fixed point of contact with the wood, distinguish woodturning and the wood lathe from the machinist's lathe, or metal-working lathe.
Peltogyne, commonly known as purpleheart, violet wood, amaranth and other local names is a genus of 23 species of flowering plants in the family Fabaceae; native to tropical rainforests of Central and South America; from Guerrero, Mexico, through Central America, and as far as south-eastern Brazil.
Segmented turning, also known as polychromatic turning, is a form of woodturning on a lathe where the initial workpiece is composed of multiple parts glued together. The process involves gluing several pieces of wood to create patterns and visual effects in turned projects.
Bob Stocksdale was an American woodturner, known for his bowls formed from rare and exotic woods. He was raised on his family farm and enjoyed working with tools. His wife of more than 30 years, Kay Sekimachi, stated that, "His grandfather gave him a pocketknife, and he started to whittle. That's how it started."
St. Paul's historic Landmark Center, completed in 1902, originally served as the United States Post Office, Courthouse, and Custom House for the state of Minnesota. It was designed by Willoughby J. Edbrooke, who served as Supervising Architect of the U.S. Treasury Department in 1891–92. Edbrooke designed a body of public architecture, much of which, like this structure, was completed after his 1896 death. Landmark Center stands at 75 West Fifth Street in Rice Park and is now an arts and culture center.
The Moulthrop family are three generations of woodturners, starting with Ed Moulthrop, credited as the "father of modern woodturning". The family has been documented in the book Moulthrop: A Legacy in Wood.
Ron Kent, also known as Ronald E. Kent, was an American woodturner who was born in Chicago, Illinois. He ran his own investment company in Hawaii. In 1975, his wife Myra gave him an inexpensive lathe for Christmas. Not wanting to seem unappreciative, he walked down to the beach and found a piece of driftwood. Fitting it on the lathe, he turned a form from it with a sharpened screwdriver. In 1997, Kent took an early retirement from his financial profession to concentrate exclusively on woodturning. Ron Kent lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Mark Lindquist is an American sculptor in wood, artist, author, and photographer. Lindquist is a major figure in the redirection and resurgence of woodturning in the United States beginning in the early 1970s. His communication of his ideas through teaching, writing, and exhibiting, has resulted in many of his pioneering aesthetics and techniques becoming common practice. In the exhibition catalog for a 1995 retrospective of Lindquist's works at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, his contributions to woodturning and wood sculpture are described as "so profound and far-reaching that they have reconstituted the field". He has often been credited with being the first turner to synthesize the disparate and diverse influences of the craft field with that of the fine arts world.
Mel Lindquist was an American engineer and renowned pioneer of the American Studio Wood Turning movement.
Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts is an Arts and Crafts center in the U.S. city of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The oldest craft school in Tennessee, Arrowmont offers workshops in arts and crafts such as painting, woodworking, drawing, glass, photography, basket weaving, ceramics, fiber arts, book arts and metalworking. The School has an 11-month Artists-in-Residence program for early career artists. Arrowmont's campus contains the oldest buildings in Gatlinburg and comprises two historic districts listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Richard Raffan is a well-known woodturner, author, and instructor who has helped popularize the craft of woodturning since the 1970s. He was a part of the "art turning" movement that saw turned objects move into galleries where they are presented as works of art. Although he has created large and valuable works of exotic woods, in his books he has also championed simple utilitarian works created for daily use. He finishes much of this work simply, using vegetable oil and beeswax, and has written admiringly of the patina of well used wooden items. "An indescribable surface that begs for a caress of the hand--that's what I think wood should provide."
Ornamental turning is a type of turning, a craft that involves cutting of a work mounted in a lathe. The work can be made of any material that is suitable for being cut in this way, such as wood, bone, ivory or metal. Plain turning is work executed on a lathe where a transverse section through any part of the work comprises a plain circle. Ornamental turning, also called Complex turning, is executed on a lathe with attachments which convert that plain circular section to variants of outline; these range from a simple series of cuts taken at intervals around the work to non-circular movements whereby the whole of the circular shape is removed to give a completely different form. Such shapes are achieved by various means, the principal ones being:
Noeline Brokenshire was a New Zealand sportswoman, who represented her country in field hockey, and as a hurdler at the 1950 British Empire Games. Later she was a gallery owner and noted woodturner, and the founder and publisher of New Zealand's first woodworking magazine, Touch Wood.
Binh Pho was a Vietnamese-American artist best known for his pierced and painted works in wood.
The American Studio Woodturning Movement can be traced back through diverse international movements and schools of thought, including Arts and Crafts, Mingei, Bauhaus and Scandinavian Design. The field was born when a number of individuals, working in different parts of the United States, began to explore design and aesthetics utilizing the ancient process of woodturning.
Norm Sartorius is an American woodworker who carves fine art spoons in many styles including natural, biomorphic, abstract, symbolic, ethnic, and ceremonial. His works are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other public and private collections. He is a frequent participant in woodworking and craft shows in America, and won the Award of Excellence in Wood at the 2015 American Craft Council show in Baltimore and the 2015 Smithsonian Craft Show in Washington, DC. Since 2008, he has co-directed a grant-funded research project on the life, work, and legacy of American woodworker Emil Milan.
Michelle Holzapfel is an American woodturner and a participant in the American Craft movement. Michelle Holzapfel has five decades of experience turning and carving native hardwoods in Marlboro, Vermont, where she has lived her adult life. Holzapfel fits the definitions of both Studio artist and Material movement artist. A product of the revolutionary back-to-the-earth movement of 1960s and 1970s, she attributes the expressiveness of her turned and carved forms to the idealism of those years. Raised in rural Rhode Island, she has worked alone in her Vermont studio—shared only with her husband, the furniture maker and educator David Holzapfel—since 1976. Her wood pieces which feature intricate carvings have been exhibited in museums and galleries in the U.S., Australia and Europe. Publications featuring her work include but are not limited to House Beautiful, American Craft, Woodworking, and Fine Woodworking.
Merryll Saylan is an American woodturner. She is credited with helping pioneer the popularization of the woodturning field and the application of color in wood art. She is noted as being one of the few women in the craft field, when she first began turning during the 1970s.
George Wurtzel is an American artist, craftsman, and blind woodworking instructor. He has taught classes in woodworking at the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired's Enchanted Hills Camp in Napa County, California and owns a furniture studio in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with a new shop set to open in 2019 in Greeneville, Tennessee.
Established in 1993 by Valen Frye and Dick Diehl, the South Central Pennsylvania Wood Turners is a charter member of the American Association of Wood Turners. American Association of Wood Turners membership is not required but it is recommended.