Robert Therrien: Table and Six Chairs, 2003; Painted metal
Photo: Tom Powel, Courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY

The first Public Art Fund project made possible in part with support from the Fuhrman Family Foundation, Robert Therrien: Table and Six Chairs featured a single, monumental sculpture, No Title (2003) (Table and Six Chairs), by Los Angeles-based artist Robert Therrien (b.1947, Chicago, IL). 

The colossal table-and-chair set stood almost ten-feet-high, so tall that viewers could easily walk beneath it. Therrien uses quotidian objects because he knows his viewers will be as familiar with their form and function as he is. This allows him to tap into the broad cultural resonance and narrative ambiguity of everyday forms. The experience of walking underneath the table and chairs, for example, can be at once intimate and uncanny, prompting childhood nostalgia or just physical disorientation.