It all started with a bench.

A few years back, Etherton Gallery hired Tucson furniture maker
Scott Baker to craft a wooden bench for its downtown space. Baker is
known for his exquisite handmade furniture, cabinets and tables in
sleek swathes of cherry and steel. (He also once ran the now-defunct
Metroform Limited photography gallery.) He did not disappoint when he
got the Etherton job.

“We got more than a bench,” says proprietor Terry Etherton. “We got
a piece of art.”

That realization inspired Art + Design, Etherton’s first-ever
exhibition of art furniture. Baker’s modernist work is displayed
alongside the more traditionally styled mesquite chairs and tables of
Stephen Paul of Arroyo Design.

The show is not too much of a stretch for the gallery, which usually
shows fine rather than functional art.

“This furniture is sculptural,” Etherton says. “It’s incredibly
beautiful to deal with.”

Etherton has also filled the walls with work more conventionally
thought of as art: paintings by Nancy Tokar Miller and Jim Waid, and
photographs by Judy Gelles. Glass artist Tom Philabaum contributed
nearly 50 tabletop sculptures in shimmering colors.

Galleries in New York have been joining forces on theme shows,
Etherton says. “What’s happening in the art world lately is there’s a
lot of collaboration going on,” both to cross-promote businesses in a
difficult economy and to inspire artists to do a little
cross-fertilization of their own. He intended his show to get some
homegrown collaboration going on.

The plan seems to have borne fruit. Tucsonans Philabaum and Paul
worked together for the first time. Both artists have run businesses in
town for decades, but inspired by Art + Design, they’ve made a
series of handsome lamps with mesquite bases and glass tops. The
exhibition signals to locals that the Old Pueblo does indeed have
plenty of top-drawer talent. Etherton pronounced himself so pleased
that he’s considering staging the exhibition regularly every few years,
with fresh artists and designers each time.

The gallery has been set up like a dazzling showroom, with the
handcrafted furniture arranged across the floor on both sides of large
pedestals topped with the glittering Philabaum wares. (“We have all
this space,” Etherton says, “but it’s rare for us to use it.”) On the
floor are a dozen or so hand-knotted rugs from Tibet, Iran and Nepal,
brought south for the show by Scottsdale dealer David Adler. The rugs’
strong geometries, floating rectangles framed in brown or black, say,
or Mark Rothko-esque bands of color, easily hold their own against the
contemporary American designs.

The gallery staff had fun trying to pair up the right wall art with
the right furniture art. Tokar Miller’s minimalist near-abstractions
hang above Baker’s furniture on the room’s north side. Tokar Miller’s
“Agua Caliente,” an acrylic on paper, is a long horizontal splash of
yellow-green, conjuring up Tucson’s lush eastside park. The faint white
of a bridge railing traces against the yellow, and a dash of red shoots
sideways.

Below the painting is Baker’s wall-hung buffet piece
“Brenda—Server.” (All of his furniture models have women’s
names.) It’s long and delicate, a stretch of countertop in pale cherry
wood with several drawers placed asymmetrically below. A slab of steel
accents the top: Baker often tempers the sheer beauty of his glossy
woods with industrial metal.

Tokar Miller, who wowed the town last winter with her retrospective
at the UA Museum of Art, shares a less-is-more aesthetic with Baker.
Both artists favor minimalist gestures, delicate shapes and pure color.
A trio of her sandhill crane bird paintings, all simple curves and
craning necks against pearl gray or pale yellow, hangs above Baker’s
“Mary Ann—Audio Cabinet.” A walnut wall-hung cabinet, named for
Mary Ann Hesseldenz, Baker’s partner in the firm BAKER + HESSELDENZ
design, is so minimalist that it doesn’t even have handles. Like the
rest of Baker’s work, it’s gorgeously crafted, and so simply shaped
that the beauty of the materials shines through.

Across the room, on the south side, a pair of giant Jim Waid
paintings takes up most of the wall space above Paul’s mesquite
furniture. Mesquite is a forceful wood, full of whorls and black
markings, and colored a strong red-brown. Waid’s paintings likewise are
alive with activity, vivid exaggerations of the pulsating life in the
desert.

“King’s Canyon” is a monumental acrylic on canvas, a triptych that
unfurls 16 1/2 feet across and rises 7 feet high. Colored in earth
tones of brown and ocher and yellow, with the shapes outlined by
vigorous strokes of black, it conjures up a seething patch of desert.
Prickly pear pads, ocotillo sticks and snake skins alternate between
realism and abstraction, depending on how close you stand.

Below this paean to the desert are pieces of furniture—easy
chairs, dining tables, tables—carved out of the Southwest
desert’s prime wood. Paul and the artisans in his workshop (he
admirably gives credit to each designer and woodworker on each piece)
tame this wild material without overwhelming it. Paul’s mesquite pieces
are thicker and hunkier than Baker’s—Etherton calls them
masculine—but they’re equally exquisite and finely made. One
table, called a demi-lune, or half-moon, is meant to be placed against
a wall, but the flat wall side is as carefully finished as the
half-circle meant to be shown off.

Paul began his furniture career decades ago by crafting armoires for
historic but closet-less houses in Tucson’s barrios, and his aesthetic
is still shaped by historical styles, particularly mission, Biedermeier
and what Paul calls presidio, for Tucson-influenced designs. His
“Pierce Lounge Chair” is an update on the classic Morris chair, and the
newly created Etherton Chaise is an old-world-inspired fainting couch
in leather and mesquite.

Philabaum gets into the desert aesthetic, too, in his Precarious
Rocks series. Globes of glass, in silvery orange or brown or blue,
are piled one atop the other. But the stacks are askew: They look more
like out-of-control prickly pears than slippery stones. Others in the
series stand alone, single marvelous multicolored orbs. Still another
local treasure, Philabaum continues firing glass in his downtown
studio, producing a line of production goods while continuing to
explore the outer limits of glass art in his own work.

Judy Gelles of Philadelphia is the lone out-of-towner in the Art
+ Design bunch, but her work hews, kind of, to the overarching
theme. The cabanas she photographs in brilliant color in her
Australian Beach Boxes series aren’t real houses. They’re homes
away from home, simple sheds by the sea, with no fine furniture to
recline on or paintings to delight the eye.

Nevertheless, these pointy little huts are marvelously designed.
Their roofs rise up toward the heavens, and their outsides are painted
in bold blocks of pink and yellow and blue. The wonderful colors and
patterns, Gelles explains in press materials, mark each box as a
particular family’s possession. The designs, different on each cabana,
are a kind of high-class graffiti—a vivid assertion that home is
where the art is.

This article appears in Sep 24-30, 2009.