Explore the Center for Art in Wood's 2018 exhibition Merryll Saylan: This is Your Life through this full-color booklet. This exhibition celebrated Saylan's career up to 2018. When she began turning in the 1970s, Saylan was one of few women in the craft field. While her contemporaries gravitated toward furniture-making and the use of exotic woods, Saylan—who came from a background in modern and contemporary design—focused on surface, using wood as a blank canvas for compositions in color and texture. Her experiments with stains, pigments, texture, and auto body finishes represented a new approach in the field, with connections to abstract painting.
