Modernism Museum Mount Dora is a small, private, and focused museum devoted to collecting, exhibiting, and promoting the work of the American Studio Movement, with a core private collection of its founder, who resides in Mount Dora, just north of Orlando, Florida. Its new show “Esherick to Nakashima,” presents two seminal figures of the two formative generations of the American Studio Movement, which came to introduce craftsmanship to the notion of modern design. While Wharton Esherick, the ‘father’ of the American Furniture Movement was inspired by avant-garde European art and architecture as early as the 30s, Nakashima began his career as a furniture maker after WWII and his work was rooted in Japanese aesthetic sensibility and philosophy, paired with the his love for the legacy of early American furniture. Esherick, the pioneer, is known to have crafted no more than a couple of hundreds pieces of furniture, while Nakashima, who operated a successful business in his hometown New Hope, Pennsylvania, has made an extensive body of work. The exhibition seeks to present a comparison between these two giants who created personal languages in their crafted design, and who had made tremendous contributions to the story of modern design in America.
