Manmade

In the Mid 1980’s, I started making a line of furniture and knicknacks under the name MANMADE. Unlike many artists, I enjoy making multiples, and I also enjoy the middle ground where function and art meet.

This is a picture from Metropolitan Home Magazine, December 1989, that shows the beginning of my line. I began with a few simple metal items- candlesticks, lamps, tables and chairs. Over a period of about 10 years, this line expanded, with somewhere over 200 different objects being made at one time or another. Some of these were one of a kinds, but most were limited production pieces, with between 3 and several hundred pieces made.

The Manmade line continued until the late 90’s, with somewhere over 200 stores around the country selling the work at one point or another, and a few pieces finding their way to places as diverse as Japan, Germany, and Abu Dhabi. I estimate that I produced somewhere over 10,000 pieces in that time, including almost 2000 chairs. At one point I was “The King Of Chairs” with over 100 different designs available.

I sold items stamped “Manmade” in almost every state, and would hope that by now they would begin turning up at flea markets and garage sales, the true mark of a lasting consumer good.
All were made from steel, mostly hand cut and bent, welded and then finished either with baked on enamels, or powedercoated.

I am no longer making any of these pieces, and they are not available. I have moved my focus to large scale public projects, and this takes up all my time, and then some, so these pictures of small objects are purely for historical interest.

One of the very first pieces I made was a small candlestick of a dancing man, called a “Smitty”. At the time, I had my studio in a small industrial complex from the 1940’s in Inglewood California, and one of my neighbors was an old machinist known only as Smitty. Smitty was always interested in what I was working on, helpful with advice and instruction, and I got to be quite fond of him. One day, Smitty did not show up for work- he had died in his sleep the night before. So I named this candlestick after him, to remember him.

I first made a dozen of these candlesticks, slowly and by hand. I sent pictures to a few stores I had heard of around the country, and was immediately sent orders from NYC, Chicago, and a few other cities around the country.

Smitty production geared up, as they sold in more and more stores. After the first hundred or so, I realized I needed a way to make more, and to bring the price down. So I had a pattern made, and we began casting them in iron, then hand detailing them. I sold Smitties for over a year, and then began seeing knockoffs. One day, I walked into a Bed Bath and Beyond store in Beverly Hills, and saw a table with at least a hundred copies of Smitties sitting on it. Of course, they looked like they had been made out of bent coathangers, and sprayed from a can, but the writing was definitly on the wall.
I chose to heed the advice of Satchel Paige, who once said “Don’t look back- they might be gaining on you”, and I discontinued production of the Smitties soon afterwards, with somewhere around 1200 of the orginals out there in the world. Since then, I have seen Smitty copies, clones, and variants made in just about every third world country you can think of- I have seen Haitian, African, Indonesian, Thai, Chinese, and Pakistani Smitties.

I think of the Smitty as my personal foreign aid program- I have no doubt helped hundreds more people around the world than Sally Struthers.