Richard Nonas: Chair

Richard Nonas (1936–2021) was an American anthropologist and post-minimalist sculptor. Born in New York, he lived and worked there for most of his life. Before becoming an artist, he studied literature and social anthropology and spent approximately ten years conducting anthropological fieldwork among Indigenous communities in Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

In the mid-1960s, Nonas shifted from anthropology to sculpture, despite having no formal artistic training. His experiences as an anthropologist profoundly influenced his artistic practice and continued to shape his understanding of objects, places, and human experience.

Questions of place, presence, and spatial relationships are central to Nonas’s work. Rather than functioning solely as aesthetic objects, his sculptures often act as markers within space, subtly altering how viewers experience and navigate their surroundings.

This can also be said of Chair. Although it resembles a familiar object, the work operates less as furniture and more as a sculptural intervention. Through its placement and material presence, it encourages viewers to become more aware of the space around it and of their own relationship to that space.