Wendell Castle is known as the father of art furniture. The artist and designer was a pioneer of a new type of handcrafted and sculptural form, one that blurred the line between art and craft when it emerged in the 1960s. Working in wood, including the technique he developed using stacked laminated wood, or in hand-carved Fiberglass, he creates bold and graceful expressions of pure form, voluminous shapes that reference the body. Along with his work as a sculptor, Castle was an educator, beginning at the School for American Craftsmen at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the early ‘60s. In 2007 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Design from the Brooklyn Museum of Art.