Wood shavings fly through the air and a fine film of sawdust settles on the cement floor of the Atrium. It’s just another Sunday at the Museum of Art and History (MAH), and the Makers at the MAH pilot program is in full swing.
On this particular weekend, the Makers at the center of the action are two young woodworkers, Scott Robinson French and Andrew Wyatt Driscoll. With steady hands and deep focus, they are hard at work measuring, hand-planing and coaxing the steam-softened wood into the graceful silhouette of a canoe.
“People were surprised we were actually going to use this thing,” says French. “But it’s actually built for the ocean and open water.”
French, a UC-Santa Cruz sculpture major, first took to wood crafting “hand planes” to maximize body surfers’ connection and movement in the waves. He explains how the canoe taking form on the Atrium floor is designed for the ocean, with an increased rocker curve (the curvature of the hull that rises up at the stern and bow) that allows it to cut through swell. It also has a low-arch hull which will ensure its ability to track. That’s canoe-talk for “move in a straight line” without the need for constant paddle correction.
Both French and Driscoll are ocean enthusiasts, but their boat building work is entirely self-taught, sprung from the first canoe sketch they scrawled last year.
“We live off the grid, so much of this work is completed with hand tools,” says Driscoll. “Typically when boats are built like this there are fasteners put in place to hold it and then they are later removed,” says Driscoll. The clamps take the place of hardware fasteners, which mean no holes to fill in later, just a continuous, streamlined shell made from strips of Western red cedar, steam-bent around the frame.
Turning the Atrium into their workshop for the weekend put French and Driscoll into a spotlight they rarely see.
“So many people do really labor-intensive activities, but like us, they usually do it in obscurity,” says Driscoll. “It was really amazing, people were asking questions that we wouldn’t have thought to ask ourselves.” French says he enjoyed getting immediate feedback from such a wide group of people—not just his peers.
Nina Simon, the museum’s new executive director, says Makers at the MAH has been a success (she says it drew almost 1,000 people to the museum that weekend). “We just love seeing the conversation people are having. People are really getting into the craft,” says Simon, whose number one innovation since taking the position a few months ago has been to infuse each exhibit with interactivity. The boat-building Makers coincide with an impressive woodworking exhibit on the second floor, complete with a “name that wood” game and an interactive smart phone application. The final Makers at the MAH is this Saturday. “Reflections on Undoing” will feature artist Lisa Hochstein ripping large pieces of paper to create meditation and soundscape and Andrew Purchin doing movement paintings.
Though the Makers series ends this weekend, the museum’s busy schedule of activities is just taking off. Family Art Saturdays will give the small fry a shot at arts and crafts, while Third Fridays will offer things like scavenger hunts and digital arts mini-fests for fun-loving grownups and Creativity Under the Influence will provide a fresh excuse to drink wine (it’s for the arts!). For a full schedule of activities at the newly invigorated museum, visit SantaCruzMAH.org.
