Norman Teague
MEDIATORS
© Norman Teague.
“I don’t feel like I’m doing a good job unless somebody’s picking up part of what I am putting down.”1 Norman Teague’s response to a question by Glenn Adamson in Smithsonian Magazine reflects his emphasis on teaching and collaboration. Teague’s lodestar is in the neighborhood of South Chicago, where he designs furniture and interiors for locally owned businesses and uses his socially engaged practice to collaborate with the community. Teague is best known in the museum world for his rocking chair designs, a quintessentially American form that has been underexplored since the prime years of Sam Maloof. Drawing on a host of inspirations ranging from vernacular examples seen on the front porches of Black and Brown Chicagoans to African traditional techniques in carving and leatherwork, Teague designed two consecutive masterworks: The Sinmi Stool—a radical and sexy new chapter in the modernist bentwood canon—and the Africana rocker, which is rootsier and more suited for the stoop.
In addition to managing his studio and teaching at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Teague has turned his atten- tion to recycling and weaving extruded plastics into vessel forms, which were included in Everlasting Plastics, a poignant exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Teague continues to spin new works out of discarded plastic containers for milk and laundry detergent once a week at a local factory.
B. 1968, Chicago, IL
Lives and works in Chicago, IL
CH1259
Norman Teague, Africana Rocking Chair, 2020, Basswood and leather. Courtesy of the artist and R & Company, photo by Joe Kramm.