What does it mean to inherit multiple identities but not make a home in any of them? For Robell Awake, this tension is where his craft is born — in navigating the spaces between his Ethiopian heritage, Western upbringing, and his place in a larger legacy of Black cultural production. In the following conversation, Awake walks us through his journey of drawing on generations of built-up knowledge and developing his unique, ever-evolving reinterpretations of the chair.

Shalini Joseph: What drew you to specializing in and adapting the Poyner chair?

Robell Awake: It all started with a research grant that I got with a friend of mine, Charlie Ryland, who's also a chairmaker, in 2021 through the Center for Craft’s Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship. At the time, I was working my full-time construction job, we were about to have our first kid, and making furniture had been just a hobby of mine for ten years. The real reason to even pursue a research grant was because in construction, parental leave is not a thing, and I wanted to be around for our child. So my wife and I decided that I would try to do furniture making full-time for the first time. 

Getting that research grant was the springboard event for me to leave my job and pursue furniture making. The whole grant centered around researching Richard Poynor and going to Central Tennessee where most of his chairs are still floating around in Williamson County. It involved documenting them, measuring them, hearing from local historians about the descendants who are no longer there, but who have been back in the past few decades for a reunion and had been interviewed and things like that. All of that research went into recreating and reinterpreting the chair.

The style of chair that Richard Poynor pioneered is the first example of a mule-eared ladderback. He started making these in the early 1800s. This is pre-industrial furniture making, so he was using only hand tools and it was extremely labor-intensive. It's the earliest example of what we think of as a modern ladderback chair, which is typically associated with Appalachia. It's associated with a more rustic, not elegant, kind of chair. Poynor elevated it and made it something that was sought after by not just regular folk, but also elite Southern society. What was interesting to me is I'd seen this chair plenty of times and it was called so many things, but it was never called a Poynor chair. It became really important for me to name it and give him credit for what is the earliest example of this style of chair.

What really sparked my interest in chairmaking, and more specifically, green woodworking, which is how you would classify what Richard Poynor and a lot of traditional chairmakers were doing, was the process. It involves starting from a log and splitting out your parts, processing it, and also using hand tools for a vast majority of it. It's practical from a structural standpoint for chairs because when you split parts out, you're keeping the maximum structural strength of your pieces as opposed to just using flat-sawn kiln-dried lumber, which you get from a lumberyard. 

Chairs are the most used and abused furniture object. When you see an old chair at a museum and you see the patina from hand oils on an armrest, it just feels so alive in a way that no other furniture object really does.

I also took a trip to Ethiopia in 2018 with my wife before we had kids for a family wedding and visited a museum there. Ethiopia has a great woodworking and furniture tradition, but there was a certain type of chair that I had never seen from this region called Jimma. They're carved out of a single log, and they're just incredibly sculptural. Everything I knew about woodworking in a Western context up until that point couldn't really explain how it was even possible to create that in a pre-industrial way. Also, to have something that's decades, if not over a hundred years old, that was carved out of a single log that is still well preserved, was incredible.

It’s similar to Richard Poynor not using glue. There's so much… for lack of a better word, technology, that gets thrown out because capitalism is always producing new needs and calling the most wasteful extractive processes “technology.” Really, past generations understand how to make something sustainable that you're going to sit on every day without glue, nails, or fasteners. That takes generations of built-up knowledge and that's what gets thrown away.

Shalini: Regarding the material both for the chairs and their adornments, what are you drawn to using and why? 

Robell: I feel like it's always found objects or ninety percent of the time stuff that I've found. It started with a chair that I made a few years ago where I used ethernet cables to weave portions of the seat and other things that I just found in my neighborhood.

I think using found objects is a way of artmaking that is very common in the South amongst Black vernacular artists that I've always been drawn to. I have a chapter in my book, A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects, about the tradition of assemblage art and yard shows, which are influential for me. Using the language embedded in that way of making art always interested me.

Including found objects just seemed really natural and also provided an opportunity to include things that speak to my Ethiopian ancestry as well. The book is a roadmap to my influences in a way and maybe a personal idiosyncratic canon, if you will, for me and the things I draw inspiration from and the things that validate my place in all of this. Having dropped out of school, never mind not going to art school or having done a furniture or design program, I definitely feel like a vernacular artist.

That artistic tradition, a lot of which is also defined as craft, is where I draw most of my inspiration. Those areas of artmaking have always been so generative in terms of Black cultural production. One story I talk about in the book is the face jugs from Edgefield, South Carolina, and how so much of them were a result of African spirituality being reinvigorated within the African American community through Congolese immigrants who brought knowledge of the Minkiesi tradition to Edgewood conjure vessels.

Learning about these histories gives me more license to also bring in elements of my Ethiopian identity and contribute to the project of Black art and culture, which is diasporic and absorbs influences. Delving into that history has let me feel more free in what I do and how I make things.

Shalini: Your chairs operate as furniture, artwork, and a form of cultural and political expression. How do you balance these different roles, and what do you hope people take away from encountering them?

Robell: I fundamentally believe all art is political, whether you're conscious of it or not. And in a very ironic way, the most seemingly non-political art is often the most political in terms of how that “innocence” operates culturally in not engaging with the world. I think that's the most political art you can make — things that don't address yourself and your position in the world. I also push back against the idea of being a conceptual artist because I feel like all art is conceptual, and to make that distinction, or to say my art is deeper and more sophisticated than yours, is wack. 

If you were to tell me six years ago that I would be a professional artist or in the art world, I'd have responded, who does that? You know what I mean? That wasn't even something that I could conceive of. But now that it's my job and I'm trying to figure out this industry, I think there's a part of it where you have to flatten everything that you're doing and make it hyper-legible in large part to people, who probably aren't your primary audience, but who have the money to buy your work.

Part of it requires categorizing what you're doing, or your intention. I've always made art even before I was very conscious of it. Operating from a place of instinct and making what I want to make is something that I'm not going to give up. I try to understand what I'm doing after it's made. I first work out what I'm doing during the process, and then after, I try to understand it like everybody else, in a way, which isn't to take away intention. There's absolutely intention there, but I feel like there's so much jargon. If I need to read five paragraphs of jargon in order to make sense of what I'm looking at, then it's not for me.

Increasingly, what I'm making is more so being collected than it is being sat on. At first, I had a lot of anxiety about that, but I'm okay with it now because I'm where I need to be. So much of what defines why I'm in this position now to make art objects is what I said no to as opposed to what I said yes to. In furniture making, it's very easy to just say yes to somebody saying, "Hey, make me that red chair on your website." But I don't like making the same thing again. When I left my job, I told myself that if I was going to do this, I was going to do it the way I really envisioned it. Making one-off things was a part of that. I didn't have a five-year plan. I just knew that I liked making things in a certain way and I would love to get paid doing that. If it didn’t work out, I'd go back to construction.

That's still my way of operating. I don't necessarily feel as married to wood and wooden chairs, and there are opportunities emerging where I can make more strictly art object kind of things. It seems like a natural evolution.

Shalini: What materials do you feel drawn to for this next commission with no wood?

Robell: I'm going to be making something out of tabby, which I wrote about in the book. It shows up in parts of West Africa, Mesoamerica, and the Iberian Peninsula, but essentially it's an early cement that was made from oyster shells. You burn oyster shells and it creates lime and then you add additional oyster shells as the aggregate with sand and water.

In America, it's found in the southeast coast of Florida, parts of Georgia, and the Sea Islands. A lot of enslaved dwellings in Florida have them, and it's really beautiful. I've been wanting to play around with that material for a while and the opportunity arose for this upcoming commission.

Shalini: In your book, you included a quote by scholar J. Weldon Smith: "Traditional African visions of personal identity and human community involve a fundamental interpretation of art and religion that has no significant parallel in Western civilization. In the modern West, attempts to bring about a more fruitful relation between art and religion produce an artificial linkage that violates in some measure the autonomy of each." While this passage addresses religion, do you feel that some of your ideas carry any similar tension between your Ethiopian heritage and Western upbringing? Or other existing dualities? 

Robell: Definitely. I think what I'm making is an expression of tension because I feel tension is where growth happens. There's the desire to express something out of the tension or to create some sort of resolution. But in getting more comfortable in inhabiting the tension, then that's when really great expression happens. 

Something I think about a lot is that I’m making things that are destined for either a museum or a private collection. I think about the life my work is going to have or not have.

There's this really great documentary called Dahomey about the repatriation of these objects that were looted during colonization by France going back to Benin. It featured the discussions around that whole process and that these sacred objects that have lived for over a hundred years have been imprisoned in museum storage. Museums collapse history and make it feel as though we're at the end of history. Everything has been resolved, and look at what culture was before modernity, especially in decorative arts. I'm seeing that as a cool opportunity too; I'm already making something that's going to live imprisoned with all these other objects of history. That's a cool prompt for me. How can I take that into account when I'm making something and give it life in the mortuary? Whereas in a lot of times these objects, especially that were looted, their initial intent was never to be viewed or used in that way. 

Identity is an interesting thing. Blackness is expansive. What's amazing about Black culture is everybody has the license to expand upon this large body of work in terms of artistic production, whether it be music, visual arts, dance, all kinds of things. What's interesting about that too is that my parents are from Ethiopia, and Ethiopia was never part of the transatlantic slave trade and is on the whole other side of the continent, but because of the way Blackness operates, that story also gets to be part of it. 

With the influx of immigrants from Ethiopia and from the Horn of Africa in the past thirty years, my parents coming in the late sixties to go to college is also a new migration, and one can see it as voluntary-ish, but so much of that migration, whether it be Nigerian Americans or Ethiopian Americans, has to do with the kind of residue of colonization. Migration is always a big part of the diaspora, whether your ancestors are part of the transatlantic slave trade or not. I think that's what's so ironic about the one drop rule, where if you have one drop of African ancestry you're Black, is that that's what makes it expansive as opposed to exclusive because the opposite is true for Whiteness. It feels so generative as a culture and new waves of diasporic migration add to the culture.

That uncertainty had been a point of insecurity at times when I was younger. I'm Harak, but I don't speak the language of Ethiopia, so I don't feel Ethiopian enough and don't feel Black enough because I didn’t grow up in the same kind of church or don't have the same background. When you lean into that tension, it’s something that's just so beautiful. In my family too, my wife is Jewish and White, and we have children. My wife is anti-Zionist and comes from an anti-Zionist family. What does it mean to be in this moment a Jewish, Black, and anti-Zionist family, and also to inherit all these identities but not make a home fully in any of them? 

I feel very confident that millions of people are getting more comfortable in those liminal identity spaces. So much of queer culture is also freeing us from being married to identities, whether it be gender, racial, or otherwise. I feel very grateful to try and contribute in expressing some sort of acceptance in straddling all kinds of identities and not trying to make a home in any of them.