[Interview] Lauren Verdugo - An Artist in Wood and More
Lauren Verdugo is an artist that utilizes woodworking, a variety of mixed media, and fine art techniques to create unique pieces not accomplishable by anyone else. Currently Based in San Diego, they have worked for the last eight years not only as an artist but also as an educator for K-12 programs and at the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation for Arts and Crafts. All of this while continuing to further her own education. They are currently a nominee for a Windgate-Lamar Fellowship award, one of the biggest honors a woodworker of her age could receive.
Lauren Verdugo, Amoeba Chairs, 2019,
Walnut, Black Limba, and Upholstery
Timothy LeBlanc: Hello Lauren, how are you doing today?
Lauren Verdugo: I’m doing good. I just had ramen today, because it’s been raining and such. That was good. Besides that, school is happening again. I’m taking jewelry, ceramics and wood, so it’s going to be a very intense semester, but it will be my last one at state.
TL: That’s San Diego State, right?
LV: Yes, that’s right.
TL: Well let us start with the wood part of that, your furniture. How is it that you would describe the style you work in?
LV: I guess I would say it’s a very obvious connection to my roots in studying mid-century modern furniture. At least since 2012 I have been “living” with that furniture and having to know the full history. How to take it apart and put it back together and then finally making furniture myself
I think I would describe it as reactions to my influences. Also, experimentation with new media, incorporating different types of wood, sculpting different elements, and only using 10% of the original construction idea but trying to push it forward in a new direction. I feel like I am still just starting out so I’ve been trying to hone my craft and find my voice based on where I came from.
Lauren Verdugo, Seat Of Reflection, 2020,
Walnut and Found Metal
TL: You referenced 2012, Is that roughly when you came to woodworking? How is it that you came to it? You are quite young to already have eight, nine years of experience behind you.
LV: Yeah, 2012 is when I first started volunteering with the Maloof. That was in my AP art history class in High School. So that was way back then. By the time I graduated from high school I had over 800 community service hours, 500 of which were from just the Maloof. I did all those things to be not at home because I didn’t have an awesome home life. So, I ended up doing community service and latching on to this non-profit art museum, that I had no idea that it existed.
My teacher in high school, [Paul Basenberg], asked me to stay after class that day. He was my art history teacher in high school. He was a huge inspiration and he had gone to the Maloof when he was in high school. So, by the time someone came from the museum to give this spiel, Basenberg was already pretty stoked about it and asked me to wait and listen to the presentation after school. Anyway, I ended up staying for seven years after I had visited the museum the following Monday.
The place had blown my mind. Like my mom, growing up she had always raised me to keep my books really nice, treat furniture nicely, and all that stuff. My mom had a few antiques in our house growing up. Now that I realize looking back, it’s interesting because my mom, when she was 17, she started to try and collect antiques. Just starting small, she worked at an Alpha Beta grocery store for quite some, bought her own car and then started buying antiques. It’s an interesting thing to look back on now, not even realizing that me playing with Legos near a giant ice box may now have a connection there.
Lauren Verdugo, Shift Side Table, 2020,
Maple
TL: That makes good sense. As you said, you started working with the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation and I know through listening to one of your previous talks you specially started working a lot with Larry White, one of Sam’s first employees. It seems that you and him have a mentor-mentee type of relationship and what has that meant for the development of your skills?
LV: He is absolutely the best male role model in my life. He has turned out to be quite an amazing artist as I have gotten closer to him. Getting to know his art practice and having it go across all media is pretty insane.
I mean when he was living on Sam’s property in the 60s, he and his wife at the time were having a second kid. He had built his own little kiln that he had asked Paul Soldner how to make, and then he had a little metal set up. So, he was doing really hairball stuff from way early on, after working for Sam during the day.
He put me through the same process that Sam did with him. Working with a professional establishes a baseline of what is good, in terms of craftsmanship, finishing and all those things. Basically, I have the whole philosophy behind two self-thought woodworkers which is Sam and Larry. So, I have had a very unorthodox education for woodworking. I don’t qualify if I was on the east coast.
TL: Do you find this apprentice-mentor education that you have gotten with Larry to be more valuable than the traditional classes like those you are taking at San Diego State?
LV: Honestly, it has been far more valuable in terms of the knowledge I have found and how deep my roots go in at least the local arts community. It’s a large family so you have people for support, to tell you about shows, and things like that.
Outside of that, I feel like having the pressure of high stakes where you are working on someone else’s stuff, that is worth thousands of dollars, you have to be good, you have to. It’s has the intensity of a job but it is not just that because it is this person’s personal work. So, you have to rise to the occasion. But you know, we were pouring concrete, patching his roof, painting the entire studio. He put me through the ringer, just like Sam did to him.
Lauren Verdugo, Taki (Waterfall) Side Table, 2019
Walnut and Black Limba
TL: It sounds like being a studio assistant is similar in a woodworking shop as anywhere else in the arts, you are there to help them get stuff done. You had gotten a bit close to this earlier but how have you found it being a woman in the male dominated art and even more so woodworking world?
LV: There is about 3 different ways.
For one, when you go to a store to buy just materials, you don’t know what you are talking about. You are always lost. You always are needing to ask somebody because you have that look in your eye that you are going to make a pen or a cutting board and that’s it. The bar is set really low.
A lot of times I will only go to places that care to remember, remotely, what my name is. I try not to go to places where they are not looking for people who are only looking to by five sticks of lumber. Outside of them just being like, “what the hell does she know how to make?”
Outside of that, in terms of teaching, my first lessons were with older gentlemen who are paying to take Larry’s class at the Maloof and I would be assisting. Larry at the beginning of class would have to validate my presence, “you need to listen to her because I have taught her how to make this project and I don’t want you screwing it up, so you have to listen to her.”
You know these guys are 65 plus and some of them have “taught woodworking” at high school for 25 years and one is missing a finger so that is hard. Having experience with K-12 and doing demos and such.. I like students over old men any day but they are good fun though. It is interesting to see that by the end of the work shop they are just like, “wow, you can do that” because by the end I am helping them finish their projects and they can’t believe it. It challenges their preconceived notions just by doing my job well and being respectful of their insecurities that need to be validated.
It is a touchy subject for a lot of female woodworkers, because it taps you on the shoulder and says, “Don’t forget, you’re a woman.” Over time it will get better. There are great national shows that are supporting women. There is A Workshop of Our Own, which is back east. It’s a women’s workshop and they accept gender fluid individuals. There is a lot more openness towards it. Making A Seat At the Table is an incredible show that gives me a lot of hope.
Joining the Furniture Society in 2019 helped me realize just how many people are like me and like education, and furniture, and to share. A lot of them are educators (all genders and a solid balance of men/women) across the country, in various art departments and I was just like, “What, you guys like furniture as much as I do?”
TL: That makes great sense and hopefully as the new generations come up with great teachers like those you mentioned and yourself, teaching K-12 and doing youth workshops it will be easier for everyone to come back to learning skills we have unfortunately lost. You have done a lot of educational projects, not strictly with your furniture, but also with these great cardboard portraits that you do. I believe you have two of those up on exhibit right now. How is it that these fit into your practice?
Lauren Verdugo, Langston Hughes, 2021
Recycled Cardboard
LV: I have two, Mark Twain and Langston Hughes, I had wanted to do two authors and it was crazy, I ended working on these the day the capital was attacked. Outside of [those] I had started making them as an art making activity in the first place. We didn’t have the funds to buy new art supplies but he had a ton of boxes from shipments of books that had come in for the gift store.
So, I started cutting up cardboard and I was looking around the historic home. There are tons of wonderful portraits that Sam had taken of Alfreda over the course of their marriage and life. They are pretty awesome but I was thinking how can I, not spend money, but get students to go from thinking in a two-dimensional sense to a three-dimensional sense, just by cutting out different pieces. It worked. Then I just kept making them myself on my own time.
TL: They really are quite striking. It is one of those things that if you explain it as an object they may not understand but when you see them they have much more impact than just some cardboard. It is similar to the woodworking, by taking a simple material and through care and effort making it extraordinary.
LV: Thank you, especially with that cardboard, as an artist, it doesn’t cost me anything to take peoples recycled boxes from them. It kind of amplifies who I decide to put in frame. A lot of time it is not necessarily “fine art” to make things like that of famous people in general. I do them as a study to challenge myself to get from 2D to 3D. It is also to say no, this actually a really important person.
Lauren Verdugo, Miles Davis, 2020
Recycled Cardboard
TL: As we talk about other materials I am excited that you mentioned earlier that you are in ceramics, Larry White’s work with ceramics, and the Maloof’s themselves collected art ceramics. So, I am excited to see what will come from your engagement of clay.
LV: Yeah, I do produce Larry’s Birdbags. Those are the only things in clay I’ve done and those were in 2017 so were a while ago. They are the only “production” pieces he (now, I) makes.
TL: As you move forward in your practice, do you have any specific goals?
LV: By the end of my career I want to be able to sustain a program where students can come in, like middle school or high school student, because that is such a volatile age. I’d love to have a workshop or art space to get students engaged, that is the end goal. I want to be a teacher and professor.
Outside of that I really do want to find my own voice and have [more of] my own designs and things like that. I want to be respected in the sense that I can do these things and will do these things. The goal is to be as effective and as prolific a person and teacher that I can be.
Lauren Verdugo, Bodhi Bench, 2018
Walnut and Zircote accents
TL: I know with the pandemic things have been thrown a bit wack, but are there any places that people can find educational resources you are part of?
LV: Yeah so locally, [Southern California], it’s really hard during the pandemic but the dA Center for the arts, [Pomona], has been awesome in trying to get little art kits out to students and trying to engage with students over zoom. They support, heavily, the younger community there.
The Maloof teens have been trying to do some things but with the museum how it is now it has been hard to sustain any programing there. Besides that, any community resources can be found on the community resources page of the Furniture Society. So, if any students are interested in trying woodworking or anything like that, there are scholarships. There are tons of ways they can try and find something where they can go away and not be here then come back and go “Wow I went off to a craft school.” Any artist starting to take their art seriously, in Southern California, The Arts Area and Curious Publishing have great resources to get your work out there.
TL: For your work personally what would be the best way for someone to follow your work or go about acquiring a piece of yours?
LV: I basically have been just doing commissions. I do still try to put stuff in Modern for All in Upland, Desert Peach in Yucca Valley, ArtLands [in Redlands], and Bunny Gunner in Claremont. So, I try to keep certain things “in stock.” I have been trying to do more of [my] clocks and things that are a bit easier to sell to people.
TL: Well thank you.
Interview was conducted 02/01/2021 and has been edited for clarity.