Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright is renowned for wow-worthy buildings like Fallingwater in Pennsylvania and, closer to home, Wauwatosa’s Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church – a design Wright famously illustrated by holding a coffee cup with an upside-down saucer on top.
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But for nearly every structure the Wisconsin-born Wright designed, he designed its furnishings, too. He wanted to create a whole-house experience for clients that included the dining-table set where they’d enjoy meals and chairs to cozy up in near the fireplace. “What can we learn about his design methods just through his chair design?” says Thomas Szolwinski, associate curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Wisconsin Art. “[They] weren’t merely functional additions to his spaces; they were integral to how he shaped environments, tested new materials and explored form on an intimate scale.”
MOWA’s latest exhibition, “Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design,” offers another angle of his career with reconstructions of 12 lost and never-before-seen chair and table designs, researched through archival photographs and drawings. The show also includes 30 tables and chairs built by Wright on loan from museums, private collections and Wright houses.
“Our first idea was to do a show of 10 important chairs of Wright’s, and it snowballed into this,” says Szolwinski. “[Through the works], we see Wright not only as an architect but as a persistent experimenter and a designer of lived experience.”
For the show’s reproductions, MOWA tapped four artisans, including Wright’s great-grandson S. Lloyd Natof, a Virginia native who has a furniture design and woodworking studio in Oak Park, Illinois. The other three artisans are Milwaukee upholsterer, sculptor and textile artist Chad Alexander Matha; Butler Metal Spinning Corp. in Butler; and Stafford Norris III, of Minnesota, who restores Wright-designed furnishings and also directed the 2002-2008 restoration of Wright’s Malcolm Willey House in Minneapolis. Norris’ other projects include building Wright’s Taliesin table lamps for the Burnham Block, a collection of Wright’s American System-Built Homes on Milwaukee’s South Side.
Because these furnishings have not been in recent public view, not much has been written about them. They include a dining chair thought to have been destroyed in the 1914 Taliesin fire; and a spun-aluminum table with two chairs designed for the Guggenheim that hadn’t been built. Even students of Wright might do a double-take. “He does something in metal that is kind of space age … as his sign-off,” Szolwinski says. Wright died in 1959, six months before the Manhattan museum opened.
The exhibition’s co-curator, Eric Vogel, is an architectural historian and scholar-in-residence at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s Taliesin Institute, and also the former chair of the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design’s 3D design department.
While most books published about Wright focus on his structures, few dive deep into his furnishings. In conjunction with the exhibition is a catalog featuring writings by Taliesin Institute director Jennifer Gray, who curated a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (“Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive”) in 2017.
The exhibition runs Oct. 4-Jan. 25, 2026. For more information, visit MOWA’s website.
