Simple Cuts: Workshop
Saturday, November 15 (10 AM – 4 PM)
Sunday, November 16 (11 AM – 4 PM)
Simple Cuts brings together art, ecology, and design through a two-day woodworking workshop and public program. Participants will explore the philosophies of Aldo Leopold and Enzo Mari—two figures who, in different eras and contexts, used simplicity as both a critique of industrial excess and a practice of attentive observation toward the living world.
Scribe the rough-sawn, fresh off the mill. Plunge cut, rip cut, true cut — the sawyer’s language names each move of the blade, each bite into the board. From these simple cuts comes the bench, the chair, the table, the shelf — the objects upon which our lives are set.
Simple Cuts is a two-day workshop and public program exploring the furniture designs of Aldo Leopold, the American ecologist and philosopher whose work helped establish the Pecos as the first designated wilderness in the United States, and Enzo Mari, the Italian designer and theorist celebrated for his uncompromising vision of design as a social and political act. Both embraced simplicity not just as an aesthetic choice, but as an ideological position. Alongside their work, the project brings in local voices from lumber, forestry, conservation, and design to open a critical conversation about the total path a piece of furniture takes — how something as humble as a wooden chair connects to complex politics of land, labor, and use.
Join us for a hands-on woodworking workshop where participants will build either an Aldo Leopold bench or an Enzo Mari chair to take home. Together, they will also construct a Mari shelving unit that will remain installed at ICA Santa Fe as the display system for Luddite, ICA’s onsite store featuring publications and locally hand-made objects.
The wood for the workshop will be sourced from Spotted Owl Sawmill, a small, independent mill. Their logs come primarily from the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez mountain ranges — landscapes that have faced significant wildfires in recent years and that, because of their unique cultural and ecological conditions, unlike other forested regions of the U.S. have not been subjected to large-scale industrial logging. The boards used in Simple Cuts will be milled from trees cut or felled under the forestry practices of the past decade: selective thinning, fire management, and restoration-driven harvest. These practices are contested: some argue they reduce fire risk and restore balance; others contend they destabilize forests and leave old-growth vulnerable. By working with this wood, the project places those debates directly into the gallery, to be taken up further in the public program.
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$250 workshop fee — includes lectures, instruction, tools, and all materials.
Sliding-scale scholarships available.
For inquiries, email info@icasantafe.org.