BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Anacostia -- Public Art: The Big Chair

DC -- Anacostia -- Public Art: The Big Chair:

Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.

Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon

underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.

Slide Show: Want to see the pictures as a slide show? [Slideshow]

Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]

Share: Facebook Twitter Digg
[1] CHAIR_040723_01.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[2] CHAIR_040723_11.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. CHAIR_040723_01.JPG: The self-described "World's Largest Chair". This was dedicated in 1959 to honor the Curtis Brothers furniture company which was once located here. Made of solid mahogany from Honduras, the chair stands 19.5 feet tall.
Multi Column: Number of columns of thumbnails to appear per page (normally defaults to 3): [1 col] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
Wikipedia Description: Chair (sculpture)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chair is a public artwork designed as an advertisement by Bassett Furniture, located at the intersection of Martin Luther King Ave. and V. Street S.E., in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C., United States of America. Chair was originally surveyed as part of the Smithsonian's Save Outdoor Sculpture! survey in 1994. It was once considered the world's largest chair, but has been overtaken by works like Broken Chair in Geneva and the temporary The Writer on Hampstead Heath in London.

Description

The chair, which stands 19 1/2 feet high, is a detail-to-detail replica of a Duncan Phyfe style chair. Painted brown with a white and brown striped "cushion", the chair is entirely made of aluminum. Weighing between 4,000 and 4,600 pounds, the chair sits on a concrete base.

Acquisition

The chair was built in 1959 by Virginia-based furniture maker Bassett Furniture. The concept for the chair came from Charles Curtis, of the Curtis Brothers Furniture company, as a clever way to bring customers to their family showroom which was located on the grounds where the chair is currently placed.

The piece was dedicated on July 11, 1959, and a plaque was placed with it, stating:

THE WORLD'S LARGEST CHAIR
PRESENTED TO
CURTIS BROS.
FOR THEIR OUTSTANDING LEADERSHIP
AND SERVICE TO THE PUBLIC/BY THE
BASSETT FURNITURE INDUSTRIES.
THE CHAIR MADE OF SOUND HONDURAS MAHOGANY
IS 19 1/2 FEET TALL AND WEIGHS 4000 POUNDS
DEDICATED JULY 11, 1959
DESIGNED
LEO M. HIRAMETT
BUILT BY J. E. BASSETT, JR.

Re-dedication

John Kidwell, the caretaker of the Chair, frequently patched holes that would form after heavy rains with cement. During the days of August 23–24, 2005, the original Chair was disassembled by a backhoe and taken away for restoration. Made entirely of Honduras Mahogany, the legs had begun to rot. On April 25, 2006, the chair was returned by Curtis ...More...
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (DC -- Anacostia -- Public Art: The Big Chair) directly related to this one: [Display ALL photos on one page]:
- 2021_DC_Big_Chair: DC -- Anacostia -- Public Art: The Big Chair (5 photos from 2021)
- 2020_DC_Big_Chair: DC -- Anacostia -- Public Art: The Big Chair (4 photos from 2020)
- 2017_DC_Big_Chair: DC -- Anacostia -- Public Art: The Big Chair (5 photos from 2017)
- 2013_DC_Big_Chair: DC -- Anacostia -- Public Art: The Big Chair (3 photos from 2013)
Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [Public Art]
2004 photos: Equipment this year: I bought two Fujifilm S7000 digital cameras. While they produced excellent images, I found all of the retractable-lens Fuji models had a disturbing tendency to get dust inside the lens. Dark blurs would show up on the images and the camera had to be sent back to the shop in order to get it fixed. I returned one of the cameras when the blurs showed up in the first month. I found myself buying extended warranties on cameras. Trips this year: (1) Margot and I went off to Scotland for a few days, my first time overseas. (2) I went to Hawaii on business (such a deal!) and extended it, spending a week in Hawaii and another in California. (3) I went to Tennessee to man a booth and extended it to go to my third Fan Fair country music festival. Number of photos taken this year: 110,000.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
Limiting Text: You can turn off all of this text by clicking this link: [Thumbnails Only]
Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].