"It's astonishing," Brown said last week, three months into the exhibition at the center's new space at 141 N. Third St., which already has been visited by close to 4,000 people. "The field came together in the '70s out of a bunch of guys - mostly guys - working in their toolsheds and basements, and now can be taken seriously as a form of art and sculpture and craft.
"It's something people discovered was incredibly basic," he said, "a way of making something, like a kind of paintbrush."
Brown's inventive, thoughtful show resolutely makes the case that Albert LeCoff, the center's founder and heart, has been making for 35 years, the first 10 out of his Germantown home (where his dogs were trained not to gnaw on any wood objects). Wood turning - shaping blocks of wood on a spinning lathe - could find an identity in art.
LeCoff, 61, is now ensconced in the Center for Art in Wood's sharp new digs in a former gym at Third and Quarry Streets, down the block from the original John Grass Wood Turning Co. founded in 1868, and surrounded by old machinery shops, new boutiques, and furniture-makers. He can hardly believe that his vision of wood turning as art, or art turning in wood, or wood in art, or however you want to spin it (the board debated which should come first in the new name, wood or art) has been so magnificently realized.
"I couldn't be happier here," he said. "We're among boutiques and major galleries. I joke that the biggest unexpected bill is cleaning the windows from people leaning against us with their faces trying to see what's inside."
At the old location, near the egress from the Ben Franklin Bridge, LeCoff said, he was lucky to get 2,500 visitors in a year. It was mostly a twist on the joke - if wood turns on a dead-end street, does anybody notice? Not really.
