Roy McMakin

Born in Lander, Wyoming in 1965, Roy McMakin is a Seattle-based artist, designer, furniture maker, and architect. His work seeks to bridge the space between art and design. McMakin exhibits many of what Farber famously described as “termite art tendencies,” in which the artist approaches a subject and gnaws at it over time and from the margins. To this day, McMakin’s termite approach continues to allow him to negotiate the slippery terrain between art and function by pulling art into the everyday, rather than pushing the everyday onto a pedestal.

Much of the artist’s work crosses a threshold between utility and contemplation, meaning and anonymity. McMakin writes, “I have always seen functionality as a tool I use to both understand and point out my fascination and relationship to objects, and to language. Call something a table, and you put your keys on it, and something happens. It’s profoundly transformative.”

McMakin’s work is featured in the collections of major museums around the country, such as: the Hammer Museum of Art, University of California, Los Angeles; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Museum of Modern Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro.