Jere Osgood

Jere Osgood (born 1936) is a leading studio furniture maker and noted teacher of furniture and woodworking. He taught for many years in the Program in Artisanry at the Boston University.

Jere Osgood was born and raised in Staten Island, New York. He studied architecture at the University of Illinois but left after two years to pursue furniture design and fabrication. Thereafter, he enrolled at the School of American Craftsmen at Rochester Institute of Technology and learned furniture making under Tage Frid. Osgood was also influenced by the work of Wharton Esherick. Osgood seemed to have a natural aptitude for furniture. He completed the four-year program in about two years, receiving his B.F.A. in 1960. He supported himself while in school by fabricating and selling small wood objects of his own design. Like other American furniture makers, Osgood was very interested in the modern furniture being made in Scandinavia. He studied in Denmark in 1960-61.

On his return the United States, Osgood established a studio in New Milford, Connecticut, where he made small objects. In the late 1960s he began to make large projects and explored different techniques of laminating wood. He published his explorations of lamination between 1977 and 1979 in Fine Woodworking.

Osgood taught briefly at Philadelphia College of Art, then at Rochester Institute of Technology for three years. In 1975 he moved to Boston University where he worked with Dan Jackson and Alphonse Mattia to build the Program in Artisanry, which, until closed in 1985, was broadly influential on the American studio furniture movement.

Today Jere Osgood resides in Wilton, New Hampshire, where he continues to design and build furniture in his own studio. He is a member of The Furniture Society (and a recipient of that organization's prestigious Award of Distinction) and New Hampshire Furniture Masters Association.

Further reading

• "Jere Osgood" in Edward S. Cooke Jr., Gerald W.R. Ward, and Kelly H L'Ecuyer, The Maker's Hand: American Studio Furniture, 1940-1990, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA, 2003.

• "Jere Osgood" in Edward S. Cooke, Jr., New American Furniture: The Second Generation of Studio Furnituremakers, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA, 1989.

• "Jere Osgood" in Michael A. Stone, Contemporary American Woodworkers, Gibbs M. Smith, Salt Lake City UT, 1986.

External links

• Jere Osgood profile at Fine Woodworking
• Jere Osgood at New Hampshire Furniture Masters Association
• Jere Osgood interview at Archives of American Art