Intrepid Makers: Judy Kensley McKie

After graduating from art school with an MFA in painting in 1966, Judy Kensley McKie figured she had better get to work making paintings. But she found it difficult to will herself to paint; it felt more natural, and more enticing, to make practical things: shelves for the bathroom, a couch, a kitchen table. “I discovered I wasn’t comfortable making things that you just put on the wall and looked at. Whereas if it was something you used, it was worth the time it took to make it.”

Near her home in Cambridge, Mass., she found bench space and shared tools in a co-op shop where most members were Harvard and MIT grads looking for a livelihood they could pursue with their hands. Almost no one had any training, and the work tended to be utilitarian. McKie spent six years or so eking out a living building purely practical furniture and cabinets. She loved the environment and the activity, but eventually she got a little bored with the furniture she was making. “I started feeling like I wanted to bring it to life,” she said.

She remembers sitting in her living room at the time with the very simple furniture she had made—all straight lines and flat planes. “I would look at it for a long time, the way you might look at clouds in the sky. And as I looked I’d turn the armrests into animals. Or in the stance of a table I would see a four-legged creature. And I would think, well, that would be one way to bring this stuff to life.”

She had been doing shop drawings using drafting tools, but now she went back to freehand sketching. And she realized she needed to learn how to carve. “For some reason, instead of going out and taking a carving class, I just bought some tools and started hacking away. I still am a hacker, but I can always get what I want.”

Her carved furniture made an immediate impact; the very first animal form pieces she made were scooped up for a traveling show, which led to the first of what would become dozens of one-person shows at prominent galleries, where the work invariably sold. In the 1990s, at the urging of Garry Knox Bennett, she had one of her pieces cast in bronze, and that experience led her to have many pieces cast in bronze and others carved in stone. These works sold well and extended her fame, and they continue to attract extraordinary prices at auction.

McKie has built a body of work that is unparalleled in contemporary furniture. Her pieces, which fuse function with sculptural vibrancy, have made a deep impact within the furniture field and well beyond it in the realms of art and design. “I love that you can make a useful object beautiful,” she once said. “For me, that’s the ultimate challenge. I want to make art that people love.”

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