Craft in America: Identity

Wendy Maruyama

In this episode meet RIT alumni and furniture maker Wendy Maruyama, who shares her craft and the challenges related to her deafness and disability. 

Craft in America is the Peabody Award-winning documentary series that shares the beauty, significance and relevance of handmade objects and the artists who make them. In this episode, Identity, the series explores how artists challenge accepted norms of gender, race, culture and place, offering truer expressions of their experience in this world. Craft in America: Identity airs Thursday, September 7 at 5 p.m. on WXXI-TV.

Identity  features Wendy Maruyama, furniture maker and educator. Born an American of Japanese heritage, Maruyama nurtures her artistic talent as a highly accomplished woodworker and furniture designer in a field dominated by men, and in the process, surmounts challenges related to her deafness and disability. Maruyama is one of the first two women to receive a Masters of Fine Arts in Furniture Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology and has been a professor of woodworking and furniture design for over thirty years. She has exhibited work nationally and internationally, with solo and group shows at The Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston, MA, Savannah College of Art and Design, GA, and the Fuller Museum of Craft, MA, among others. Her work can be found in many national and international museum collections and is represented by the Sparks Gallery, San Diego, CA.

This program is part of Move to Include, a partnership between WXXI and the Golisano Foundation designed to promote inclusion for people with intellectual and physical disabilities. This Move to Include model expands nationally this year to five additional communities with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people. To learn more about the national efforts, visit movetoinclude.us.