Adam Manley
Associate Professor
Furniture Design and Woodworking
SDSU
Bio
Adam John Manley is currently Associate Professor of Furniture Design and Woodworking at San Diego State University, and has taught full time at Maine College of Art and UMass Dartmouth, and as adjunct at University of New Hampshire. He has also taught extensively at Haystack Mountain School of Craft, at Penland School of Craft, and at Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Adam has done residencies at UW Madison, where he was the Windgate Artist in Residence, the Haystack Open studio Residency, and the Lanesboro residency in Southern Minnesota. He is looking forward to an upcoming two-month residency at the Center For Art in Wood as a summer 2023 ITE fellow. Adam sits on the board of directors for the Furniture Society, and served as board president from 2020-2022. He is currently also on the board of the Emma International Collaboration, a Saskatchewan Canada based non-profit that hosts a biennial collaborative residency event in northern Saskatchewan.
Adam has developed a unique voice that blends functional construction methodologies, material exploration, and a focus on the conceptual potential embodied within craft, furniture, and functional familiar objects. Adam has taught at numerous institutions, from colleges to craft schools, and continued to develop his ideas and work in an ever-evolving way. Adam’s work has addressed issues relating to our unique sense of place and how familiar functional objects link us to that sense, humor, individual and universal relationships to furniture, and, more recently, the relationship between furniture and the historical objects used to inflict violence on others throughout time. Adam has exhibited his work nationally and been part of events and exhibitions related to "World Wood Day", an event hosted by the International Wood Cultures Society, in both Nepal and Cambodia. Adam is the co-founder, along with colleague Kerianne Quick, of the contemporary craft zine/journal, CRAFT DESERT, a publication which is nationally recognized in the field. That collaboration has also yielded a successful national exhibition of over 60 artists from across the country at City Gallery, in the Spring of 2022, and will continue to morph into more ambitious projects and events.