Furniture maker, artist, and educator Wendy Maruyama has been creating innovative work for more than 50 years. While her early pieces combined the ideologies of feminism with traditional craft objects, her recent work moves beyond the boundaries of studio craft and into the realm of social practice. The wildLIFE Project focuses on the endangerment of elephants — a cause that is deeply personal to the artist. Maruyama recently took a sojourn to Kenya, where she met with wildlife advocates to investigate the ongoing dangers of elephant poaching. The trip became a powerful source of inspiration, motivating her to create a new body of work that incorporates a strong social message.

Wendy Maruyama has served as a professor of woodworking and furniture design for over 30 years. She was one of the first two women to earn a Master’s degree in Furniture Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Over the past four decades, Maruyama has exhibited her work nationally, with solo shows in New York City, San Francisco, Scottsdale, Indianapolis, Savannah, and Easthampton. Internationally, her work has been shown in Tokyo, Seoul, and London. Her pieces are also part of numerous national and international permanent museum collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum (London); Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas); Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (Launceston, Australia); Museum of Fine Arts (Boston); Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Arts and Design (New York); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles); Mint Museum of Art (Charlotte); Fuller Craft Museum (Brockton); Mingei International Museum (San Diego); and the Oakland Museum of California.

Maruyama is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the California Civil Liberties Public Education Grant (2010); multiple National Endowment for the Arts Grants for Visual Artists; the Japan/US Fellowship; and a Fulbright Research Grant to work in the United Kingdom. In 2020, she was awarded the United States Artists Fellowship and the American Craft Council Gold Medal for Consummate Craftsmanship in 2024.

Photo: Michael Lin