Furniture maker, artist, and educator Wendy Maruyama has spent more than five decades creating innovative, boundary-pushing work. Rooted in traditional craft, her early pieces explored feminist ideas through furniture and material culture. In recent years, her practice has expanded beyond studio craft into the realm of social practice, addressing urgent global issues through art.

Her ongoing wildLIFE Project confronts the endangerment of elephants—an issue that is deeply personal to her. A research trip to Kenya, where she met with wildlife advocates and witnessed the realities of poaching firsthand, became a turning point. The experience inspired a powerful body of work that merges craftsmanship with activism and storytelling.

In addition to her studio practice, Maruyama has shaped generations of artists as a professor of woodworking and furniture design for over 30 years. She was among the first two women to earn a Master’s degree in Furniture Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Her work has been exhibited widely across the United States and internationally, with solo exhibitions in cities including New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Seoul, and London. Her pieces are held in major museum collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among many others.

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