For over fifty years, Michele Oka Doner has systematically studied the natural world and derived her formal vocabulary from it. She works in a multitude of media including bronze, terrazzo, silver, porcelain, wax, paper, and textiles, producing public art, sculpture, furnishings, costume, prints, drawings, and set designs.
While all nature inspires her, the sea—its flora and fauna—is particularly resonant. A childhood spent in Miami Beach led to an intense affinity for myriad forms of marine life and subtropical vegetation. Together with the mysteries of the sky at night, these are the leitmotifs of her work. All are present in A Walk on the Beach and its extension, A Walk on the Beach: Tropical Gardens, designed over a twenty-year period between 1990 and 2010. This terrazzo, bronze, and mother of pearl pavement forms over two miles of concourse at the Miami International Airport and has become an icon of the city. The Coral Wave chair was designed when her work on A Walk on the Beach began. It is among Oka Doner’s earliest chairs—over the course of her career, she has designed only about forty and this one has always been in her personal collection until acquired by LACMA.
Each of the chairs Oka Doner has designed is unique except this one, which is not only the first Coral Wave, but also the only one to be executed in silver. After seeing the silver example in Oka Doner’s studio, the interior designer Peter Marino commissioned three others for Feldpausch, a fashion house in Zurich. They were made in bronze three years later, in 1993.
Coral Wave represents Oka Doner’s mission of sharing her wonder in our natural surroundings and the urgent need to cherish, protect, and incorporate the increasingly ephemeral world around us. As writer Frances Brent observed in Modern Magazine: "Consistently, her design work has focused on a desire to re-dignify daily life by instilling an awareness of ritual. She is interested, for example, in the meaning of sitting on a chair—the privilege of elevation. The bronze and silver Celestial and Coral Wave chairs draw attention to themselves, to their hard essence, when they’re used, but they also have a kinship to objects of ceremony because of the swirling, glittering symbols of sky and sea that are part of their surfaces."
Wendy Kaplan, Curator & Department Head
