Michael Mode

b. 1946, Quakertown, Pennsylvania

SELECTED COLLECTIONS

The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI
The Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Evanston Hospital Corporation, Evanston, IL
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN
Museum of American Craft, New York, NY
Museum of Art & Design, New York, NY
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Tang Museum of Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY
University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2004 Nature Transformed, Wood Art from the Bohlen Collection, University of Michigan
Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI
2003 Put A Lid On It: Containing Human Experience, American Association of Woodturners,
Brand Library Art Galleries, Glendale, CA
2002-03 Turned Wood - Small Treasures, del Mano Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2001-03 Turned Wood, del Mano Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Sculpture, Objects, Functional Art Exposition, New York, NY and Chicago, IL
2001 Solo Exhibition, del Mano Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2000 The Fine Art of Wood: The Bohlen Collection, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Demonstrator, Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts, Gatlinburg, TN

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

2004 Nature Transformed, Wood Art from the Bohlen Collection, Hudson Hills Press
2001 Iona Elliott, "Eastbound", Woodturning Magazine, #100, June
2000 Bonita Fike, The Fine Art of Wood: The Bohlen Collection, Abbeville Press Publishers
1999 Ray Leier, Jan Peters & Kevin Wallace, Contemporary Turned Wood:New Perspectives in a Rich Tradition, Hand Books Press
William R. Duce, The Fine Art of Small Scale Wood Turning
1995 "French Polishing on the Lathe", American Woodworker, #44, April
Fine Woodworking, #102, back cover feature
1993 Tony Lydgate, The Art of Making Elegant Wood Boxes

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Michael Mode is a self-taught lathe artist whose first experience of woodturning came in 1973 while watching a Moroccan craftsman using an Arab bow lathe to make chair spindles. A few years later when trying a lathe himself for the first time, his aptitude, passion and design sensibility for woodturning immediately became evident. Mode draws inspiration from several sources: the material itself (particularly burls and figured woods), the interplay of openness and closure in a lidded form and the art and architecture of Moghul India and the Islamic world, which he visited extensively. Most recently, he’s been inspired by the combination of geometric patterns with the curvatures of turned objects to produce surface designs of intricate symmetry and grace.